


fill your thirst, drink a curse

by akhikosanada



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Monster Hunters, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Fluff and Angst, Ghosts, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mutual Pining, Sylvix Big Bang (Fire Emblem), Unresolved Romantic Tension, also glenn is a ghost and haunts sylvain, and other cryptids, background claudue, background ferdibert, felix and sylvain run away and take a monster-hunting trip through europe, maybe dimiclaudue who knows, one small smut scene, very background glenn/holst mostly bc glenn is Horny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:08:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25981117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akhikosanada/pseuds/akhikosanada
Summary: "When he’d begun actually hunting, he had come up to Sylvain for help on his hardest cases, because Sylvain was trusting and Sylvain never asked questions and Sylvain knew the most ideal ways to make dead things disappear. But when Miklan left, it had been Sylvain who had come to him, eyes red as blood and rotten leaves, putting the everything he’d ever been and the nothing he’d ever become and the perfect, boring life that was planned out for him right into Felix’s icy hands and icier soul. Felix doesn’t truly understand why, even now, though he knows exactly what could drive someone like him to deal with devils and forego their own humanity; no, what he doesn’t understand is why choosing his cold, constant company instead of the comfortable warmth of loneliness and detachment, but perhaps there is nothing to understand, and Sylvain is just as unhinged as Felix is.In any case, they make for a perfect team, the both of them; Felix knows what monsters look like, and Sylvain knows all the ways they like to hide. "Felix and Sylvain hunt for monsters and ghosts. Written for Sylvix Big Bang 2020.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 13
Kudos: 115
Collections: Sylvix Big Bang, Sylvix Squad Super Stories





	fill your thirst, drink a curse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kofukura](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kofukura/gifts).



> isaac: since this is a pinch hit you can write a shorter fic!  
> me: ok! :)  
> also me: [writes 24k anyway]
> 
> This idea has been on my mind since february, and I've been honing the story since then! I'm so so happy it finally gets out into the world, with BEAUTIFUL art by [@starfeil!](https://twitter.com/starfeil)  
> Thanks again to the Sylvix Big Bang mods for organizing this AWESOME event!! It was an absolute blast working on this. A lot of love and thanks to Elliot for betaing me, and to all the people who supported me and hyperead me when I was doubting myself most. I love all of you so much <3
> 
> Please listen to the [PLAYLIST](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3URuUo3zZ3iuQSIPUqEhYS?si=-R_ZtsCBS5Czvwg6-s8rTQ) I created for atmosphere <3

The camper is an ugly yellow, poisonous like bile and that sweet, disgusting American mustard Sylvain eats by the barrel, a perfect match for the color of Sylvain’s eyes in the sickly sundown streetglow.

“If that’s your definition of discretion, I’m already regretting having said yes,” Felix tells him, arms crossed over the sling of the heavy messenger bags lacerating his torso, filled to the brim with clothes and utilities and too many memories he’d rather leave behind if given the choice.

Sylvain just laughs in that familiar, carefree melody that Felix has learnt by heart, irritating enough to make him forget the shapes he sees in the shadows of his blackest nights. “Trust me — people are so busy paying attention to the smaller details that they tend to entirely miss the most conspicuous things.”

The paint job is almost perfect save a few chips here and there, probably to make it feel more lived-in, although Sylvain bought it mere days ago; one of his last purchases with the Gautier fortune, Felix knows, a final, pointless act of superficial rebellion over all the most obvious ones he’s been doing for a few years, from his college major in creative writing to his recent resignation from his honorary position at his father’s company. Felix can see the dark lumps of bags through the small windows, and guesses one of them holds all the cash Sylvain could decently get out from his three bank accounts, because Sylvain would rather die than let his family trace him but somehow wasn’t above using daddy money to keep them afloat for the first few months. Felix is grateful for that, though he’d never say it. Plus, Felix would be the one paying for all the different, regular expenses they’d have to wire under their fake names, so it was only fair.

(Rodrigue knows he’s leaving anyway. Rodrigue did nothing to stop him. Felix still wonders how to feel about that.)

Sylvain gracefully opens the passenger door for Felix, an overworked flourish that’s somehow too natural reshaping his posture. Felix unceremoniously throws his bags to the back of the camper, dropping in a pile among the rest on the ratty, queen-size mattress Sylvain had insisted they take because he _doesn’t sleep well on hard floors_ , and Felix would have called him a baby if he wasn’t exactly the same, so he’d settled on a simple groan and an all-too-dramatic roll of eyes. He does not let his gaze linger on the blades glinting in the streetlight and on the bats lying in the corner. In this light, they almost look like the baking rolling pins Annette used to threaten to bash him over the head with. The van is cold in the early April night, even though Sylvain drove it right to Felix’s street, and Felix wonders how they’ll survive the winter months, wonders whether they’ll manage to get the heating to work somehow, wonders if they’ll have to zip their sleeping bags together and huddle under the same covers to keep warm, wonders if he should stop wondering altogether lest his thoughts betray how much of a bad idea this all is.

“Are you sure you wanna do this?” Sylvain asks him, hands steady on the steering wheel as though he isn’t the one to who Felix should be asking this question instead. He’s looking straight ahead, at the long, dark one-way road, in the same direction as Felix.

“Yes,” Felix answers, and he’s never been more certain of anything in his life.

That laugh again, imbued with summer wind and wild, wasted youth. “No takebacks now.”

“Oh, _Gautier_.” Felix takes his time feeling the shape of the word into his mouth and along his tongue. It’s the last time he’ll ever say it, after all. “We both know you’d be helpless without me.”

It isn’t true, and it's a fact Felix has always been well-aware of, ever since he was seven and met a nine-year-old boy with bruises on his arms and burns on his legs and buttercups in his hand; still, Sylvain humors him with an _if you say so, Fe_ as he turns the key into the ignition, and the bleary headlights shine white as dust and bone off the pavement when they drive away.

***

Their first real job disinters memories Felix had thought long gone, distant childhood reminiscences tasting of ashes and sour patches.

They’d been mostly fine, the first few months, at leaving everything behind, parents and past and all. He’d thought he’d miss his friends more, if he’s being completely honest; he thought he’d miss Annette’s singing and Ashe’s night reading and Ingrid’s arguing, he thought he’d imagine Dorothea’s whispers and Caspar’s laughters and Bernadetta’s stutters in place of the noises slithering in the shadows, in the dark of their early-summer nights. But time and the weather had been kind to them and the few jobs they’d stumbled upon hadn’t been too difficult, and since there was next to nothing to be scared of, there was no need for the burden of sentimentality weighing in scribbled letters over torn college paper, no relief to be found in dreamt-up communication, no fear to be felt with Sylvain’s distilled warmth against his skin as they lie back-to-back underneath their own, worn covers.

Their days are metronomed, methodic in a way Felix wouldn’t have thought they’d be for a life spent on the road: Felix always wakes first, showers in the tiny toilet-slash-bathroom they have to empty and fill the tanks of every few weeks, emerges to the scent of French-pressed coffee grounds and the random, stale toast Sylvain decided to make into oversweet and underspiced _pain perdu_ , nibbles on some as Sylvain scrolls on obscure forums and flips through local newspapers for strange stories and stranger deaths.

Sylvain is refreshingly quiet in the mornings, the ever-bubbling undercurrent of his thoughts subdued and tongue-tied by unusual concentration and bad dreams. They don’t come from the things they kill during the day, Felix knows; they would not be fueled by a random _krojemanchen_ they find in someone’s bathtub, or by the leprechaun they sometimes discover trying to steal from their camper until they realize there’s not much worth the shot, or even by Glenn’s ghost, ever-looming over him for years in a way Felix has learnt to decipher and unbegrudge. No, Sylvain has been plagued with nightmares his whole life, and Felix had soothed the burn of the bruises and them with hugs and tears and words until he grew older and bitter and had none left to spare. They both take their coffee black — _like my soul_ , Sylvain often says, and Felix is not sure his tone is entirely joking — so they sip on the same cup until Sylvain points at something that caught his eye, and Felix nods as he sharpens the edge of his dagger onto the kitchen whetstone.

Sylvain still asks Felix for directives, even now, even though Sylvain has the more theoretical knowledge of monsters out of both of them. Fond flashbacks fill Felix’s thoughts oftentimes, of sleeping over at Sylvain’s while he still was his neighbor, perusing books and false grimoires about gods and monsters and all the things in-between, of Sylvain telling him stories of lost minds and possessions, and it had made Felix giggle until he turned thirteen and came face-to-face with the truth of them and laughter left him like Glenn left this world and Dimitri left his life. There is a twisted kind of irony in there, that Glenn had taught Felix how to fight against the spirits he could not see and the things creeping in the folds of his curtains until it became Felix’s second nature, yet refused to show himself to him now that he’d become these very things. Or perhaps it was only that commonality in strange passions and their shared interest in the supernatural, that made Glenn haunt Sylvain instead of him.

Still, Felix has always been more practiced in the ways of hunting — the one thing Felix was good at, after, all, was chasing ghosts and monsters; it was only natural, therefore, that he’d make it his profession. He’d learnt all of Glenn’s tips and tricks right from the source, had desecrated his late brother’s room in search of all the things Glenn had always said he saw that no one else could, had read through notebooks over notebooks of compiled amateur research and blurry analog pictures, had taken Glenn’s dagger as a parting gift and Glenn’s mantle as his own.

When he’d begun actually hunting, he had come up to Sylvain for help on his hardest cases, because Sylvain was trusting and Sylvain never asked questions and Sylvain knew the most ideal ways to make dead things disappear. But when Miklan left, it had been Sylvain who had come to him, eyes red as blood and rotten leaves, putting the everything he’d ever been and the nothing he’d ever become and the perfect, boring life that was planned out for him right into Felix’s icy hands and icier soul. Felix doesn’t truly understand why, even now, though he knows exactly what could drive someone like him to deal with devils and forego their own humanity; no, what he doesn’t understand is why choosing his cold, constant company instead of the comfortable warmth of loneliness and detachment, but perhaps there is nothing to understand, and Sylvain is just as unhinged as Felix is.

In any case, they make for a perfect team, the both of them; Felix knows what monsters look like, and Sylvain knows all the ways they like to hide.

“Look,” Sylvain says as he slides his phone across the small foldable table for Felix to scroll through. There’s an article from the website of a local journal spreading thin letters over glaring white: _SERIES OF UNEXPLAINED DISAPPEARANCES PUTS 10.000-PERSON TOWN TO A STOP_. Felix brushes an idle finger over the touchscreen, past the Facebook ads for things they no longer have the money to buy — _this is the fourth mysterious disappearance in two months_ , the article says; _The police has yet to find a common thread to link them all together, though they do suspect the culprit of being the same person._ The few people interviewed all mention the victims were last seen walking to school, or going for a jog, or going back home from work through the local forest; Felix skips past the boring paragraphs about the socio-economic impact on the town and its inhabitants, about the mayor’s declaration, about the vigils and group forest hunts started by the locals. _The series of abductions had begun with the sudden disappearance of a thirteen-year-old girl_ , the last line states.

“What size is that forest?”

“Already checking,” Sylvain says as he sips on the coffee; he’s pulled out his second phone, the one he keeps for emergencies, the one that has all the numbers of their closest friends saved, just in case. Sylvain’s fingertips move across the map, zoom on the area. “Not that big, all things considered — there’s a big river going through it, though, and some stone quarries all around.”

Felix shrugs. “Maybe it’s just a local serial killer looking for a sick thrill.”

“Unlikely.” Sylvain’s eyes are sharp, rough, untamed garnets that could cut into Felix if his fingers erred too close. “People have mentioned seeing animal prints, large like a bear’s, in the forest.”

“But there are no bears in this region.”

Sylvain smiles, and Felix’s blade sings a final vibrato across the whetstone.

The town is an hour’s drive away, a small, sprawling thing like a misshapen spider web someone tried to remove but was too short to reach; Felix and Sylvain always lived in the city, though they often took trips to the Fraldarius summer home on the rocky shore come the warmer weekends and sunnier months. Only one of the three local restaurants is open, a cheap, classic bistro with a terrace overlooking a stone fountain the city mayor must have put two-thirds of the yearly budget in, and the look the owner sends them when they enter is— not quite suspicious, but more than a little inquisitive. Sylvain, ever the more social between the two of them, launches into his usual spiel, poem-practiced and song-sweet: they’re traveling South through the by-roads because the freeways are too expensive, and needed to make a stop to eat. “I’m not giving the government any more money,” he says with a wink, and when the owner laughs, crass and raucous, Felix knows they’ve earned his trust.

It’s something Felix has always admired, and perhaps a little envied, in Sylvain — no matter how dire the situation, the moment you’d let him talk, the battle was won. Felix sips on a coffee that’s more like simmered bean juice as Sylvain talks to the chef and the waiters and waitresses; one of them lets her hand stray over his bicep as she mentions how scared they’ve all been lately, pretty green eyes looking up at him under inked eyelashes. Felix refuses to analyze the feeling that claws through his chest at the sight.

“My daughter was the first to… go missing,” the owner says. His eyes are blue, Felix notices when he gazes back at him, as though carved into dark circles and faded laughter lines.

“I’m really sorry.” Felix parrots the words he’d heard years ago, when he’d stood in front of a closed-up coffin. He glances to their surroundings, seeing no newspaper page fluttering open on its own, no ruffle in Sylvain’s shirt or Sylvain’s hair; for once, Glenn seems to have disappeared in whatever void ghosts usually fade into when they’re too bored or bitter to watch the living. “Have the search parties ever come up with anything?”

The man shakes his head. “We’ve even been offering money to whoever would find her, but... We just have to keep searching,” he cuts himself off, “I’m sure of it.”

“And what if she’s dead?”

Felix knows he should have let Sylvain talk his way into this one when he hears complete silence fall over the room. The loud wall fan blowing away the warmth of mid-May feels like ice over his bare arms.

The restaurant owner regards him with cold, dead eyes, and the familiarity brings shivers along Felix’s spine. “Then I’d pay double to see her killer dead and buried.”

Felix files away the information for later use as Sylvain stumbles through apologies for the trouble _his little brother_ is making. He’ll talk about it to Sylvain, later — they’re going to need a better cover, because they sure as hell do not look anything like each other.

“What’s your name?” the waitress asks, her hand hovering back over Sylvain’s arm again like she owns him.

“Basile,” Sylvain lies flawlessly. “Basile Dominic.”

“And I’m Aloïs,” Felix answers, “though I figure you don’t really care?”

The girl is offended enough for her hand to snap back and cross over her chest. Felix imagines he’ll get his own victories wherever he can.

Lunch is a quiet, relaxed affair: Sylvain tries to appear his former, refined self when he orders a goat cheese salad with duck breast fillets and a hazelnut vinaigrette, and Felix remains true to who he’ll always be when he almost cuts Sylvain’s fingers off as he dares try and steal a french fry that soaks in the shallot sauce Felix’s steak is glazed with. It’s a better meal than most of the ones they’ve had since they’ve left everything behind; as much as Sylvain likes to cook, the simple gas stove in their tiny kitchen corner does not allow for five-star three-course meals, and Felix has learnt to make do with Sylvain’s quick stir-fry noodles and pasta with pesto from storebought jars. They’re two of the five customers currently haunting the place, the three others either getting a quick beer at the counter or reading the local newspaper on the terrace or fruitlessly trying to hit on one of the waitresses — one of them mentions making plans for another search tonight, another hunt in the woods, and Felix does not need to look at Sylvain to know they’ll be joining them.

When the search party sets foot into the forest, the sun sets with it. It’s the kind of forest Felix has often gone on walks in when he was a child, the kind of woods where Glenn used to take him on bike rides and summer dips in the lakes, the kind of place hiding the worst things Felix has ever hunted, back when he’d begun. Thick, leafy trees rise high in the sky and shut off all skylight, the late evening sun refracting through and over the beaten paths in otherworldly shapes; the off-key, pagan paean of the faraway river reverberates into the space in miscadenced distortions. Felix’s flashlight shines across beds of curb-stomped blades of grass and over the feet of the vigilante townsfolk, flickers off-trail as Sylvain tugs on the sleeve of his hoodie to slow him down and pull him away from the rest of the group, a signal as much as a warning. _Let’s do our own thing_ , Felix reads in Sylvain’s gestures, in Sylvain’s gaze as he watches his face. _The only ones we can trust are each other_.

Felix is not inclined to disagree. The hometowners had not batted a single eyelash at the sight of two complete strangers joining them on their little witch hunt, too busy inspecting their crowbars and loading the occasional hunting rifle — least of all the restaurant owner, who’d regarded them with satisfaction and the hint of an eager smile eerily similar to the glint of his meat cleaver.

They walk in silence for the better part of a quarter-hour, careful fear infused in the unwavering light beam they throw in wide half-moons as they push forward and deeper into the grove, surrounded by nothing but the scent of humid, upturned earth and the sound of leaves like crushed-up bones. There’s a decrepit, moss-eaten bridge that an equally decrepit, moss-eaten wooden sign describes as leading to the stone quarries rising over the river shallows, and Felix’s laughter at Sylvain’s grimace when he spots them is almost the only thing breaking the arrow-taut silence between them.

Almost.

Both Felix and Sylvain jump at the sound of running footsteps to their right, Felix’s fingers reaching for the dagger stuck through the belt loop of his jeans, Sylvain twirling the baseball bat in his hands as a wry smile slashes his features in half, and when a bare foot steps forward and into the light Felix readies himself for a strike.

The sight of a lost, distraught girl makes him drop his stance altogether.

Her blue dress is torn to rags, clawed through where it probably used to flare around her thighs; her dirt-stained, blood-caked legs and feet stumble towards them as she reaches forward with a pleading hand, her blonde bob matted by sweat and grime around her face and into her bloodshot blue eyes. Sylvain lets his arm fall by his hip as he walks forward to her, and Felix follows in his footsteps just as she collapses against his chest, her small hands grabbing onto Sylvain’s shirt for dear life, for hopeless salvation. _Hey, it’s okay, you’re okay now_ , Sylvain whispers into her hair, shushes her hysterical sobs, or laughter, Felix cannot recognize, with a soothing hand over her shoulders, and the sigh that leaves Felix’s lips is more relieved that he’d like to admit.

“You have to save them,” the girl cries, grabs onto Sylvain’s hand, “you have to, they’re in the quarry, all the others,” and Sylvain complies, lets himself and Felix be led across the bridge as the river sings on and on.

The girl cannot be any other than the daughter of the restaurant owner, Felix muses as Sylvain introduces his false self: she has her father’s eyes, sky-blue and dug out by tragedies and loss, her short nails scoring Sylvain’s skin as she drags them up the hill overlooking the stone quarries. Sylvain helps her climb down the steep, loose slope that leads down, offers Felix his arm to grab on so that he does not slip, says nothing as Felix takes it. Felix imagines Sylvain’s mocking laughter once they actually make it out, once they get back to the camper that’s become their home, imagines he’ll let Sylvain tease him if only as proof of their own, continued existence. The hush of desertion blankets the whole quarry like century-old dust; broken tools and dulled shovels lie forgotten along weed-weeping walls; pine trees loom above the stone where their roots have broken through and wound into the earth below. The girl lets go of Sylvain’s hand as she pushes further into the pit, twisting around the cranes and diggers as though she’s grown up there, and Felix follows her alongside Sylvain into the middle of the trench.

Bodies lie dead on the stone, mangled and eviscerated and bloodless, the white of their eyes relucent in the flashlight beam, open gashes on the side of their throats and waists and legs clean of anything but rotten shreds of muscle and bone.

“What the fuck,” Sylvain whispers.

 _The series of abductions had begun with the sudden disappearance of a thirteen-year-old girl_ , the last line of the article had said, and Felix is hit with a sudden remembrance, a truth he’s learnt first-hand.

Thirteen has always been a propitious age for children to get possessed.

“Sylvain, look out!” He screams as he pushes Sylvain out of the way, and a clawed hand comes just shy of tearing his arm off.

Felix runs back and tries to put distance in-between him and the girl — who’s _not_ a girl, not anymore, who’s now nothing but a monster wearing the skin of what used to be an innocent thirteen-year-old. Not that any thirteen-year-old Felix has known has ever been the slightest bit innocent. It’s strangely familiar, which makes it all the more terrifying: short, blonde hair turns into grey, blood-matted fur; pale skin and torn-out nails mutate into long, dark arms with claws like serrated daggers; icy blue eyes melt down to snow, jut out from what used to be a human face, stare right at Felix through the lack of pupils.

Somehow, Felix is calm enough to think that if this had happened to Dimitri, back then, he would at least have had an excuse to kill him on the spot.

“What the fuck is that?!” He hears Sylvain scream in the distance, hidden behind piles of stones only waiting to bury him alive if the monster notices, and so Felix dashes forward, knives out.

He knows about skinwalkers in theory only: former humans who turn into creatures once they’d worn animal pelts, able to incarnate every corpse they leave behind. The article had mentioned bear prints, but what is standing before Felix is far more monstrous, eight-feet tall even hunched over, with long arms dragging along the ground and a jaw lined with too-human teeth. The monster lets out a roar that’s way too reminiscent of human laughter for comfort, saliva dripping in fat specks as its bony frame shakes, swiping at Felix like he’s just a bothersome bug it needs to get rid of. It’s fast, but Felix is faster, and prides himself on his quick reflexes when he dodges another vicious slash of claws to slice open the creature’s arm from the wrist up — it wails in an earth-shattering cry, and Felix barely sees Sylvain kicking the monster’s legs from behind before stepping aside and rounding onto it again, his dagger burying into one of those bulbous, lifeless eyes.

The monster’s paw hits him right in the gut and sends him flying through the quarry.

Everything hurts, and Felix prays to all the gods he doesn’t believe in that nothing’s broken — when his eyes open, the skinwalker sobs another hysterical laugh as it slashes Sylvain’s wooden bat clean in half, and Felix scrambles to his feet as he runs to them, the hilt of his dagger burning into his palm.

“Don’t worry, Fe,” Sylvain shouts in a tone that very much worries him, “I’ve got this—”

“What do you mean, you’ve _got this_?!”

Sylvain runs back to the crane and climbs up, and the skinwalker shrieks in mad laughter as it closes down on him, and Felix thinks Sylvain is, indeed, completely insane — at least, until the creature tears down the latticed boom in one swipe of claws and it collapses right over its head.

Felix glances to where Sylvain has jumped down from where he’d climbed up, reads _now!_ in the shape of his lips, and rushes to where the skinwalker has been knocked down to bury his dagger into its neck and jaw and head until it’s more flesh and blood than bone. His breathing fans scattered over the mess he’s made, over his kill, until the monster shifts back into a regular human, eyes gouged out and face entirely unrecognizable.

It’s not the little girl, the body underneath him. Felix doesn’t know if he feels relieved.

“What the fuck was that.” Sylvain’s pace would seem nonchalant and careless to anyone but Felix; Felix knows how to spot the frantic tremors in his fingers as he flexes and unflexes his fists, decodes terror in the way his eyes, darkened gold, flit from him to the body back to him. “Wait— shit— are you okay—”

“A skinwalker,” Felix answers, his hands unclenching from the animal pelt wrapped around the man-creature’s shoulders. He can feel his ribs bruising as he speaks. “They’re not from here— not from this continent. That’s strange.”

Sylvain frowns, his face cut in half through the xanthic flashlight glow. “I know what they are. We need to burn the bodies.”

“Not before we collect the reward.”

“Felix,” Sylvain says in that tone he uses for desperate measures and when Felix is being particularly reckless, “what do you think these guys will think if they see us here, literal strangers, covered in blood, near the bodies of their dead relatives?”

The remembrance is water-clear, flows seamlessly into Felix’s mind — the too-clean hunting rifles, the glimmer of a blade under artificial lights, the barely-buried bloodthirst on the villagers’ faces. Sylvain is right, he decides almost immediately, though he won’t say it; instead, he reaches for the box of matches in his pocket as Sylvain throws the bodies into a grim, bloody pile, watches Sylvain pour the gasoline from a random generator onto straight, blond hair and a tiny body, and sparks them all down to ash.

They don’t bother staying around for the bonfire celebration; they reach their camper under cover of the copse, Sylvain sliding in the driver’s seat more out of habit than out of worry, although the seatbelt carves uncomfort and pain through Felix’s near-broken body. They drive through ink black landscapes and greyscale roads, count their blessings when they haven’t crossed anyone’s path in three-and-a-half hours, don’t bother taking a shower and scrub off the grime until they stop in the middle of nowhere. Felix erases his footsteps as he swings down from the passenger seat and gets to the back of the camper, his eyes scanning around for security cameras like it’s second nature, although there’s nothing around them but trees and cold asphalt and whatever lies awake deep, deep into the woods. He’s more of a ghost than Glenn, at that moment, who’s busy catching Sylvain’s shirt in the air as he undresses and trying to throw it into Felix’s face, his invisible presence yet again testing his little brother’s reflexes and ability to dodge even now. The shirt falls in a dirty heap, blood on black, in a corner. Felix wonders if Sylvain will blame him instead of the ghost for making a mess again.

The sound of running water soothes Felix’s nerves, a regular rhythm similar to the swipes of cloth over his dagger, a practiced movement that turns white into red. He doesn’t realize he’s bouncing his leg until Sylvain, wordless, shows up behind him and dumps a towel over his head and he stops. Sylvain looks at him like he wants to say something — anything, like he wants to fill up the dreadful, deafening silence. Felix can’t have that, not today, not now, and so he disappears under the latch of a bathroom door and the lull of too-cold water.

There’s the comfort of familiar darkness when he comes out, Sylvain’s shape on the mattress illuminated by his phone screen, and Felix follows the guiding light as he climbs up next to him. Sylvain didn’t even bother covering his chest with the thin, ratty blanket that’s become his over the last month; there’s a healed scar near his collarbone that Felix wants to trace with the tip of a finger, as though he could blur it away like a line on a chalkboard. He lies down, instead, turns his back to Sylvain as he pulls his own blanket over his neck, a comforting habit. He doesn’t know if Sylvain wishes him good night, like he’s taken to do; if he does, Felix doesn’t answer.

Time passes, stretches, a silent song on repeat; Felix counts the seconds to the off-beat of his feet, drumming too fast on the edge of the mattress, flashes of color and sound flickering beneath his eyelids until he opens his eyes to stop them from reaching the depths of his memory. He’s about to sit up for a sip of water when he feels the shift of Sylvain’s body, sees more than he senses Sylvain’s arm wrapping him in an awkward half-hug, and the shivers that sift along his spine like sugar when Sylvain buries his nose in the crook of his neck make him freeze.

“What are you doing?”

“‘m cold,” Sylvain mumbles. Sylvain has never once been cold in his life. Felix can feel his bare skin blazing against the cotton of his own shirt, and the desperate habit of calling him out on his bullshit rises in his throat.

His feet have stopped their constant motion; his breathing evens out to the rise and fall of Sylvain’s chest. “Is that so?” he answers instead. He shuts his eyes, and doesn’t open them again.

***

Late June twilight sets Sylvain’s hair into fireworks as Felix sees realization dawn onto his expression. “So basically, you’re a vampire,” Sylvain says, nonplussed. Felix sees the sight ruffle of his hair in non-existent wind as Glenn’s spirit probably slaps his own immaterial face from where he must be hovering over him.

“There are different kinds of ‘vampires’, you know,” their host answers, imitating quotation marks with a delicate curl of fingers, and the aggravated glint in his eyes almost makes Felix laugh.

He shrugs instead, unbothered and a little provocative. “I mean, you’re all allergic to garlic and sunlight, right?”

“Those are _strigoi_ ,” the client says — Ferdinand Von Aegir, Felix remembers, because of course only someone with such a pompous name would live in a _fucking Rennaissance castle_. “Please do not compare me to these… _creatures_ ,” he adds, clipped, for probable lack of a better, less polite word. “Or to the damned _pijavica_ , for that matter. In any case, I am perfectly fine eating pesto and, contrary to what a certain writer has popularized, I very much do not _glitter_ in the sun.”

Felix means to ask him if his language is always half as pompous as his name, but he sees the gaze of the man beside Aegir, and promptly remembers that his own, discarded name is also a little pompous, notwithstanding the fact that vampires can claw out hearts right from chests if angered, so he decides to promptly keep his mouth shut and prays that Sylvain doesn’t run his own.

“You have not been called forth in order to discuss terminology issues, if I remember correctly.” The man simulates the shadow to Aegir’s sun: dark where he’s bright, obsidian hair thrown over an eye in a lazy, half-greasy strand, both dressed in matching grey-and-gold blazers over more casual clothing. Hubert von Vestra — as Felix just remembers, too — looks at them with as much disdain and wariness as his status of husband-of-a-centuries-old-vampire allows, which is to say, only enough to be noticeable.

Felix averts his eyes to the courtyard below and the tourists visiting the Heidelberg castle; from the tower room they’re in, they look like the buzzing fruit flies that used to elect residence near his fridge when he forgot he’d bought too much watermelon, flitting around to the fastness of the flashes flickering from their cameras. Aegir, as he’d explained, was trying to rebuild the collapsed parts of his castle so that more tourists could appreciate the magnificence it boasted back when he was alive — or alive-r, in the true, human definition of existence. Felix doesn’t know much about the species or how they came to be. He doubts even Glenn did, as vampires keep the truth of their turning like they keep all their gold and all their secrets: buried in the velvet plush of a rush of blood; quietened by oaths and the luster of canines.

It’s almost funny; from a bird’s eye view, Aegir would look no different from the average, random rich kid one would find wandering the streets of Sylvain’s and Felix’s old neighborhood, would pass as one of the Gautier cousins, with the red hair and the redder eyes and the reddest lips. Felix surmises it’s the thing with monsters. The most familiar are always the most dangerous.

Felix brings his teacup to his tongue, blows cool over the rim, lets the taste of southern fruit dilute the conversation. Sylvain and Aegir have launched into an animated tangent about art; Aegir gestures to the paintings hung around the ornate tearoom, the darker wallpaper emphasizing the gold of the frames and bringing out the somber shades to the naked eye.

“We have a lot more stored away in our mansion,” Vestra says like it’s the most natural thing in the world, “but… unfortunately, Ferdinand wanted to display them in the rebuilt parts of the castle.”

“Which is why, again, we need you to drive away the _thing_ that’s been lurking around. I haven’t been able to sleep in this castle for decades.”

“Don’t worry about that.” Sylvain winks, and visibly deflates when it’s received with a frigid stare. “Tom and I will take care of it.”

“Tom, huh?” Aegir asks, grapefruit eyes staring right through Felix like they reach down to read the fine letters of the name engraved on his heart. “I’m most certain these aren’t your real names.”

Sylvain, to his credit, barely bristles, his nails digging only a millimeter more into the skin of his crossed forearms. “Oh yeah? What gave it away?”

“I _told_ you we shouldn’t have used the Tom Clancy ID for the recruitment form,” Felix says as he whirls on Sylvain — well, as much as the ornate, 17th-century armchair he’s currently seated in allows him to.

“As conspicuous as that was, it’s not quite that.” There’s a blush of fondness over Aegir’s gaze, at that, the color of defunct rivalries and forgotten friendships. “You do seem to come from a rather well-off background, first off. One can easily shed a name. An education is harder to erase.”

Felix slumps lower in his chair. “This is the first time anyone has accused me of being rich.”

“These kinds of things are quite noticeable to the trained eye,” Aegir remarks, gaze sharp and interested as he stares through Felix still, as though trying to decipher exactly which shade shines in pale reluscences around the edges of his soul. “You guys were probably nobles before. Well— centuries and centuries ago.”

Felix watches Sylvain’s face twist into a graceful frown from the corner of his eye; it’s the kind of frown he’s seen Sylvain wear for years in the company of his father’s false friends and lackluster lackeys, delicate and subtle in its insolence, a pretense of inanity for a more asinine audience. “What— are you saying there’s past lives or something?”

Aegir’s shoulders raise in half a shrug as he glances to the sky outside, chiffon yellow like torn cotton, prelude to rain and night and rain. “Of a sort,” he merely answers, and the last sip of tea he curls into his mouth shuts him up on the subject. “In any case, I do not care who you are right now, as long as you rid us of whatever is haunting my halls.” The scent of berries follows him as he rises, a silent beckoning for the rest of them to follow.

Their introduction to the more private parts of the castle is quiet and relaxed: the gilded hallways, the thin glass windows, the dusty bedrooms — all is filled with the proud song of Aegir’s voice and nothing is out of place. There is the occasional, absent wind rustling the curtains, or the sound of too-human gurgling water, or the clink of metal against metal as a door opens and something scuttles out of sight, but Vestra assuages their worries and makes them sheathe their blades with nothing but a pointed look. Aegir had assured them that most of the creatures roaming around the castle were, if not benevolent _per se_ , at least inoffensive enough not to cause trouble other than the breaking of ancient, priceless vases and the disappearance of left-behind keys; Sylvain, at the very least, completely forgets about the purpose of their stay once he launches into a heated debate with Vestra about chess, resulting in the promise to play a game as soon as they’ve successfully hunted the Thing before they leave for another job.

“I thought vampires didn’t get along with the rest of the bestiary,” Felix aims at Aegir once he’s taken enough steps to be far enough from both Sylvain and him in case one of them has a random exclamation, his weakness to loud redheads doing him more than a little disservice in his current situation.

Aegir retaliates with a strained smile he struggles to keep for long on his wrinkleless face. “Again, not _all_ vampires. I know most of them by name. The ghosts, especially.” Felix notices his mask cracking only thanks to a decade of scrutiny, only because he’s learnt all the ways in which Sylvain’s own veil crinkles and folds and tears at the edges. “Well… used to know.”

“Are you immortal?”

“Nothing can stay forevermore, in this world.” Aegir’s eyes flicker to nightfall as he looks out to the world below. “No one has ever found a way to kill me, if that is your question. Myself included.”

Felix thinks of Glenn dying as he lived, radiant and burning, thinks of golden hair and azure eyes and thirteen year-olds. “That sounds…”

“Nice?”

“Not disagreeable,” Felix admits, and Aegir laughs in the lightest mockery, hearty and tender and bitter as teatime agrumes.

“So you’d say being cursed to see your loved, non-immortal ones grow old and wither away before you isn’t disagreeable.”

A picture flashes in Felix’s mind — of red hair, and faded freckles, and a private smile; of an effortless existence dissected from his side like a surgery; of being so very much alone again. He does not dwell on it.

“Can’t you turn them into vampires as well? Isn’t that what your lot does?”

Felix expected offense and shock, but Aegir’s face, when he looks at him, is dyed the shade of shame and sorrow. It’s almost worse, Felix thinks. “... Humans cannot be turned unless they _don’t_ want to be turned.”

Understanding sparks into Felix’s mind like a stricken match: there’s the real, five-act tragedy of Ferdinand von Aegir’s life, beyond the tattered tableaux and the dilapidated drapes, the lost titles and the existential secrets — that someone who’d give him a lifetime of mortal happiness would also bring about immortal despair.

“It is also a rather long and painful process that I would not wish on anyone.” Aegir shushes the apology that threatens to spill out of Felix’s lips with louder words. “Also, you get to witness exactly how and why the world goes to hell and to sit on the ashes afterwards. Completely powerless to do something about anything.”

“You sound like you’ve already done that.” Felix’s frown drips onto his tongue, but Aegir merely smiles, small and enigmatic and intensely warm.

“Perhaps I have, then.”

Felix has always hated riddles and hated riddlers more, and so he decides that he hates Ferdinand von Aegir.

A couple quick footsteps bring him back at Sylvain’s side; Sylvain, whose garnet gaze flits between Aegir and Felix and back the way questions break apart on a tongue tip, whose eyebrows knit into cacographic runes along the line of his nose, whose frame breaks the tightrope distance Felix put between them as he slides up behind him. Felix hears Aegir scoff like Sylvain has personally offended him and his whole family, for some reason. _What happened?_ Sylvain whispers, the question too serious and curious to be anything but misplaced, but it has always been the more human of monsters that Sylvain was most scared of, so Felix figures he’ll tell him, later, when they finish setting up.

The Thing seems to reside in one aisle in particular, but roams down the hallways, and Vestra instructs Felix and Sylvain to sleep in different bedrooms for better coverage, some meters away from each other and separated by a few other _salons_ and a bathroom. Sylvain somehow manages to talk Glenn into roaming the rest of the castle hallways in his stead while they sleep, just in case it comes from another, more dilapidated part of the building. Sylvain, because old habits die hard, chooses the bigger bedroom; there’s a king-sized, canopy bed in the middle, with heavy drapes pooling onto the floor in dark crimson silk, and not much else of note. The floorboards creak like a dying bird when Sylvain walks up to the mattress and throws himself onto the thick blankets and plush pillows, making a noise somewhere on the slippery scale between a dog growl and a whale song. Felix snorts, which is probably undignified for their station in Aegir’s mind, but when their host rolls his eyes to the ceiling and motions for Felix to follow him to the other bedroom, Sylvain’s feet are already on the ground again, an immediate reaction like a well-practiced knife slice.

“Don’t bother,” Sylvain says, his smile putting the harm in charm, lips flushed like the flesh of a freshly-bitten berry. “I’ll help him settle.”

Felix’s bedroom is as small as it can get for the guest aisle of a former royal residence, which is to say, not a lot: his own bed is queen-sized, the wood of the frame built of cheaper timber than Sylvain’s, but it otherwise looks like a perfect copy-paste. A claw-foot tub stands proud and pristine in front of the arched window, an obvious, later addition, one that makes Felix lazy and tired already; Sylvain closes the door just as Felix tests the faucets for hot water, sits next to Felix on the floor and against the porcelain edge, his hair fanning striking against the ivory bathtub in that exact way that makes Felix want and want and want.

“I don’t know why you don’t trust him.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust him,” Sylvain tries to argue, even when he knows Felix has seen the stares he tried his best to conceal. “It’s just that I’m…”

“Worried?”

Sylvain’s lips twist. “Let’s call it that, yeah.” His eyes bore into Felix, carving themselves deeper into the holes in his soul. “I can’t fault him. You’d make a dashing vampire. You already got the aesthetic down pat.”

Felix laughs, the minute wisp of air a storm between them. “What even is the vampire aesthetic?”

“I dunno— long dark hair, pale skin, half-dead half-rat—”

Felix slugs him in the shoulder and hopes it’s going to bruise, just a little, although he didn’t hit him hard enough for that — _never_ hits him hard enough for that.

“Okay, sorry, I deserved tha—”

“I wouldn’t let myself be turned so easily,” Felix answers in a rush, in an effort to cut him off. “We promised.”

That seems to catch Sylvain, oh-so careful in his stances and sentences, off-guard; his eyes widen to blood-edged, freshly-dug gold, lips parted on a teeth-held, second-long fragment, before the lines of his face soften into silk and his voice fills the room with a breathless syllable.

“Yeah,” he repeats, and Felix cannot meet his gaze, stares back at the water fluming into the tub. “We did.”

“And I won’t be able to hold it if I’m immortal, obviously.”

Laughter leaves Sylvain like a gust of summer wind and a familiar song played on loop in the dark of a curtained bedroom. The tub fills up and up and up, and when Sylvain rises and makes to go back to his room, Felix realizes it’s the first time he’s going to sleep alone in months.

“Don’t close the door.” He doesn’t speak about his own.

“Of course,” Sylvain says, and carefully shuts Felix’s, his presence carried away by the rustle of his feet on the floorboards and the flush of warm water.

Felix’s gaze gets sky-stranded as he steps out of his clothes and into the tub. Stars rise and fall through the window as though he’s turning a colorful wheel in a children’s book, mapping the constellations he never sees in their camper when nighttime comes around. Time flows through the soap that evanesces under his wrinkling fingers and into lukewarming water, but he enjoys the rare luxury of relaxation all the same, lost and alone in his thoughts. His usual showers are spent listening to Sylvain’s radio or to Sylvain’s cooking or to Sylvain talking to Glenn in a one-sided conversation, so the peculiar quiet settles around him in a foamy, jarring reprieve. He wonders what Glenn has to talk about, now that he’s alone with Sylvain; there’s no question that Aegir probably saw his ghost snooping around earlier, but Glenn must not have found anything of interest, if he had no complaint to bring up to them. Felix isn’t jealous of that, not anymore. Who needs anything else than the dread of the grave as a constant companion?

Felix dresses back into his shirt and boxers, opens the door in full — creatures and ghosts don’t care about closed doors, he’s learnt along the years; they slither under any crack that exists and burst through those that don’t, turn daggers under pillows from precaution to necessity. Felix would much rather be able to spot the threat before it gets the jump on him and he’s found dead in the morning — or worse, if he’s not found at all.

The light on the nightstand switches off under his finger, and when he turns on his side and burrows into the sheets, he tucks in his feet, still. There are a lot of things hiding under one’s bed. Only sometimes monsters.

Sleep has always been Felix’s harshest mistress, in the way it so often eludes him. The wind picks up, outside, drums raindrops against the glass pane like someone’s throwing pebbles at his window for a midnight tryst, and the room fills with the scent of rain and thunder and rotten things. A comforting smell, in their usual circumstances, when the metal skeleton of the camper shields him from the storm, when the low ceiling above their worn-down mattress glistens with the fake galaxies Sylvain had stuck on it a few weeks ago, in the exact same pattern and constellations they shone along Felix’s eyelids back in his childhood bedroom. Here, in this huge room, in this huge castle, the scent makes him toss and turn, makes him bury his arms under the pillows and stretch, makes him curl back onto himself and the cold side of the bed. It’s a night like the ones he spent after Glenn’s death and Dimitri’s accommodation in his place, taking up all the space in Glenn’s huge, huge bed while Dimitri was tucked away under glowing stars on a children’s ceiling, hearing footsteps and cries and the tearing of a paper-thin wall, listening to Dimitri talking to nothing and no one and Felix, most of all, about all the things he saw that Felix couldn’t grasp.

It comes to him in a clasp of thunder throwing harsh shadows across the window panes, grasping at his heart like a clammy, clawed hand: this isn’t home, this isn’t home, this isn’t home.

His fingers seek comfort along the pommel of Glenn’s dagger, slide up and down the spine; he hasn’t slept with it in weeks, has not needed to with Sylvain’s warmth at his back, with Sylvain’s scent lulling him to sleep like the rain used to do. Sylvain has chosen to replace the bergamot and spices he used to dye across linen by natural nothingness; now, his presence is all pine needles and rosemary and thyme, a different kind of earthiness closer to their current reality and the entire truth of his being, bitter and fireprone yet ever tea-soothing. There’s a subtle trace of it, barely discernible, along the collar of Felix’s shirt, more an accidental consequence than a deliberate tincture; it’s enough for him to let his eyelids fall, to thumb the gilded dagger guard, and when he drifts away the wind in the chimney sings lullabies, dirges, requiems.

There’s a door in front of him, leading to things that were and are and will be; Felix has pushed it open, and has stepped into sunlight. It’s blinding, at first, scarily blinding — the flare fades and there’s a lake, deep and crawling with fear. Someone bathes on the shore; Felix has not seen them yet, but he will know, down in his heart, like a fated non-occurrence, and when he has reached the end of the sand path roses spring from the bushes and bloom in bloody blazes. His friend walks into the water like the day goes far away, a kaleidoscope of crimson and lives and book pages, and Felix sees what he will see that he has not seen yet — footsteps in sand, footsteps in grass, footsteps in blood; bubbles exploding like stars overhead and the taste of someone on his tongue; a bottle of flowers, dried and dead and gone, light streaming through like a song a hand abruptly shuts away, an astounding, deceased sun in the most familiar of shapes.

Felix has looked down at his feet, and thorns dig into his ankles as the ground caves and cages.

He tries to scream— he knows he tries, or has tried, or will try, his throat scorched to ashes from the inside like a licking flame, dirt and dust and death in his mouth as his windpipe bursts into his chest— something is on him, or in him, and he doesn’t know if it tries to claw its way out or bury itself in, and the hand has long nails like obsidian and lapis and a single, blue, blue eye bulging out of the skin, and it’s not the right color, it’s not sky or seaside, and it screeches his name like a swear, full of hatred and bile, _Felix, Felix, Felix_ —

“FELIX!” Sylvain screams as he opens his eyes, but it’s not Sylvain’s face he sees: there’s something on him, pale as curdled milk and twice as toxic, black eyes and an open mouth sucking the life out of him and transmuting nightmares back in its place. Felix barely registers the awful feeling of fingers curling into his hair like reins and the weight on his chest, crushing like a failed dream, before he reaches for his dagger and finds it gone—

Sylvain grabs the creature by the hair and pulls it back from Felix, Glenn’s dagger in his hand sinking into rotten, clammy flesh, again and again until it slices its throat clean and the corpse falls back and pools onto the floorboards. Realization slow-drips into Felix like overrated coffee — he’s coughing and choking on thin air, his lungs pushing out the oxygen his brain so desperately tries to keep in, and when he looks down nothing is crawling through his ribcage but the overwhelming tide of relief, seeping through ivory gaps like surf through slate. Sylvain kneels over him, his fingers still holding onto the dagger like the creature — a mare, Felix realizes now that he’s more lucid — is going to come back from the deader-than-dead; blood summer-freckles his face, blends in with the rest, and in a twist of irony, he’s never looked more breathtaking, Felix thinks, just before Sylvain brings a warm hand between his shoulderblades and helps him get it back one tap at a time.

Felix coughs into Sylvain’s shoulder, punctuates his sentences with heavy inhales and exhales, _you’re okay, you’re okay_ , Sylvain whispers like a mantra, and Felix doesn’t know if Sylvain’s reassuring him or himself.

Aegir and Vestra show up ten minutes later, enough time for Felix and Sylvain to get their composure back after another, too-close brush with death. Aegir looks happy enough to finally be rid of the Thing that roamed his halls, barely looking like it’s three-twenty a.m. and ignoring the dark underneath Felix’s eyes or the conspicuous blood on the floor; when Sylvain asks him for the reward, he produces a black credit card from the pocket of his too-posh pajama pants.

“Bank code is 30040417. You’ll be able to withdraw your payment tomorrow.” Felix and Sylvain are too tired and blasé to question him, and merely choose to shuffle back to their camper, parked along the perfect tree line that borders the Philosopher’s walk, on the other side of the old bridge.

“Everything but that castle,” Sylvain says on the way.

“Everything but that fucking castle,” Felix agrees.

“Everything but that _damned fucking_ castle,” he imagines Glenn saying in the sudden gust of wind that messes up their hair.

Felix collapses down on their mattress as soon as Sylvain slides the camper door shut, fully clothed; and maybe it’s a miracle, or maybe it’s that encounter with probable doom, but Sylvain doesn’t even complain when Felix doesn’t toe off his shoes. The glow-in-the-dark stars shine sickly, faded green over his face; his body is drawn to the other side of the bed like a masterless puppet, his eyes finding Sylvain as he watches over him, exhaustion-marbled expression unreadable through the stripes of urban light shining through the windows.

Felix falls into him like one falls into sea: defeated, desperate, destined.

Sylvain’s arms wind around him, his fingers untangling Felix’s hair as he whispers words Felix is too bone-tired to understand, and Felix closes his eyes to the scent of pine and thyme and home.

***

No matter how far back he looks, Felix cannot remember the last time he’s visited a city so… peaceful.

The whiplash tastes like a cool slap of seasalt gale in the face. The atmosphere is nothing like the oppressive, claustrophobic small towns they’re used to pass through, nowadays; it’s also so dissimilar from the ambience that permeates most other capitals, polluted dark emphasizing the lime luster of faded-gold history, fogging up blemishes and corruption like vapor on a broken bathroom mirror. Perhaps it’s the large sidewalks, or the car-less streets, or the distant ocean scent; perhaps it’s the red-brick buildings, or the sprawling trees, or the cool summer sun; perhaps it is none of these things, and the sight of Sylvain’s back as he walks in front of him suffices.

Sylvain leads them to their destination with a sprightly spring in his step and an immuable smile; his gaze dances from the towering trees to the flowering bushes and back to the stone graves resting in-between like dots in sonnet verses. This place, too, is much different from the graveyards Felix is used to walk through — it’s much different from Glenn’s, with its straight paths of gravel and its iron fences and its sepulchres of carved marble, grey on black on grey. The tombs they see here are simple slabs of stone buried amongst luscious patches of ferns and flowers, letters and dates sheltered from the sun by the ivy nestling in their shapes. Felix wonders if Glenn’s grave looks like this, now, if Rodrigue’s finally destroyed the remnants of the Fraldarius crypt after the pillaging, wonders if Glenn sleeps better underground now that his body isn’t another trophy, another prettified reminiscence of the former family glory.

Glenn probably is floating around, somewhere, mingling with other, more peaceful ghosts; if he is, Sylvain doesn’t seem to acknowledge him, too busy opening the wide expanse of his arms at each gust of cool breeze.

The drive up to Copenhagen had mostly been an attempt to flee the heat wave crushing the south of the continent; Sylvain had done nothing but complain as soon as the temperatures had hit the mid-twenties, and after a dozen days of suffering from his whining more than from the hellish, near-forty-degree heat, Felix had kicked Sylvain out of the driver’s seat and taken the road straight north. It probably was for the best, anyway — perhaps monsters and creatures were as uncomfortable as Sylvain in the sun, because as the days had grown longer and longer, their job opportunities had shrunk to the bare minimum, with the immense majority of them being kicking spirits and imps out of summer houses and preventing the occasional werewolf from causing a rampage. Now that the wind no longer felt like an open oven door, money started to trickle back without them having to pilfer their secret family funds, and their last kill — a _rusalka_ that had tickled half a village to death — had earned them enough to sustain them for a few more, jobless weeks.

“We should celebrate,” Sylvain had told him that night, face-to-face under the fake ceiling stars glowing over his freckles, “take a week off or something.”

“It’s not like the work we’re doing is legitimate,” Felix had answered, propping his head onto his arm as his mind traced them into constellations.

“Doesn’t mean we don’t deserve to take it easy, once in a while.”

Felix, contrary to Sylvain, had never taken it easy once in his life, and Sylvain must have remembered it, because he’d let out a huff of quiet laughter at the sight of his expression.

“Okay, let’s at least go to a nice restaurant, deal?”

“Not vegetarian?”

“Not vegetarian.”

“Deal,” Felix had said before tucking himself in, filling the space between them with the even sound of his sleepy breathing.

Sylvain had insisted they walked there, for the camper would have been too conspicuous — _You were the one who chose to paint it fucking yellow_ , Felix had spat in blame, and Sylvain had the gall to tell Felix to walk faster since he had shorter legs, and Felix had powerwalked right into the cemetery-park before he’d known in which direction he was going. He doesn’t regret it, now; there’s something strangely soothing about the place, a grounding feeling taking root around his bones, that this is whence they all come from and where they’ll all return, one day, once they’re old and weary and, Felix hopes, happy. _Through here_ , Sylvain tells Felix with a glint in his gaze, and Felix follows him onto a foot-beaten, sinuous path, ducks under grapes of leaves to walk underneath a tall crown of tree branches falling over and around a huge, knotted trunk, probably centuries older than they are. Felix takes the hand Sylvain offers him when he almost trips over a sunken root, and it would be so decidedly easy, Felix thinks, to twine his fingers with Sylvain’s and never to let go, to let his presence crawl and carve into him like tombstone ivy, to hide the cracks and flaws in Sylvain’s hand with his own.

Sylvain lets go when they’re back onto the main, cobbled path, and Felix lets him, and Felix swallows down his own disappointment and cowardice like cough syrup.

They leave their timeless piece of peace to step back into the bustle of civilization, the sun raining over the street in clothed gold, spinning their summer-drenched steps towards their destination: the building is tall and exactly alike the others down the streets they’ve walked through, white-frame windows overlooking the pavement below pushed into the gaps between colorful, pastel bricks. Sylvain, because he knows three words of Swedish and none of Danish, almost messes up the greeting to the waiter when they come in, before catching his mistake and twisting it into English, and Felix snorts as they’re led to a table near a bay window with a view to the sparkling canals. His eyes scour the menu for what he believes is a cut of beef — expensive, too — and lifts his gaze to Sylvain doing the same, his eyebrows furrowed into focus as though nothing can disturb him, not even Glenn.

Not that Glenn is here with them: his brother, Sylvain had once told Felix, completely vanishes when they go out into the world. Even Sylvain cannot sense his presence, let alone see his shape, and not because he is incapable of following them out; Felix remembers the first month after they’d run away, when Glenn used to carefully misplace cutlery and glasses each time they’d went out, when Sylvain and Felix would wind up back at the camper only to find a couple bottles of wine awaiting them that Glenn had somehow carried out without being spotted. No, Glenn must have become moody and melancholic, Felix surmises — he imagines himself floating, immaterial, witnessing all the things he could not do and all the people he could no longer properly talk to, and figures he would have the same kind of reaction. Children see Glenn, though; children are always more exposed to the dead, a kind of bond that can only be built and maintained between a being that just came into life and another who left it not long ago. Most dwelling ghosts, Felix had learnt along his years of childhood friendship with Dimitri, have only been dead for a few years, at most, tethered to Earth still by sorrow and spite and so much suffering. Felix wonders if Glenn feels it, too, if the reason why he’s still at Sylvain’s side like a persistent curse after almost ten years is because he resents them being able to live the life he should have led.

“What are you staring at?”

Felix’s eyes refocus on Sylvain’s face, on the mischievous twist in his smile, on the teasing glare of sieved candlelight over his irises, on the sharp cut of his jaw as it rests into his palm. _You_ , Felix almost answers, unbidden and too truthful for comfort, and he glances to the canals before his tongue betrays his mind.

“I was just thinking.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“I was wondering how Glenn has managed to dwell here for so long. Why he’s still stuck haunting you.”

Felix expects Sylvain to laugh, expects him to tease him for being jealous, to smooth over the turbulent thoughts with a few, carefully chosen careless words, but Sylvain’s face when Felix turns to him again is stunned into silence, his perfect mouth half-opened on a held exhale, his gaze fleeing Felix’s in discomfort and dismay.

Felix frowns. “Sylvain, are you—”

“I can tell you,” he says, quick as a desperate escape. “If you want. Not here, though, but…”

Felix glances to the tables around them, lost in their chatter, half of the sentences ringing out in languages they cannot understand. Still, Felix imagines they should not tempt fate and talk about things such as ghosts and hauntings in a public place, and shrugs in agreement when the waiter brings them two glasses of wine and Sylvain’s composure slips back into flawless, artificial place.

Felix is so used to talking about death that he doesn’t realize they’re chatting about life: about how they’ll need to find somewhere with good wifi soon to illegally download another batch of movies, because they’ve finished the last one on Felix’s phone yesterday; about wanting to do some sightseeing the day after tomorrow, to go see the different parts of the city; about how much Felix misses working out and how Sylvain has found some place to play beach volley if they’re feeling like it. Felix eats all the vegetables on his plate, for once — some of them leave a trail of sauce at the corner of his mouth, and after three unsuccessful attempts at making Felix wipe it off itself, Sylvain reaches out to swipe it with his thumb with laughter in his voice and softness in his eyes. Felix almost slaps his wrist off, almost tells him not to treat him like a kid, but when Sylvain brings the thumb to his mouth his eyes chisel hieroglyphs into Felix’s, and Felix’s voice vanishes along the trail of Sylvain’s tongue over skin.

The rest of the evening trickles smooth as pudding down his throat, settles in his stomach with the warmth only good wine and hushed-up yearning can provide. Sylvain pays for the whole five-course meal with the Gautier black card, typing in the pin with one hand as he looks over the way home with the other. The sun paints shades of fuschias and lilacs over deepening blue, reflects on the canal water and the boats on the dock in glimmering silvers, fades to dark under Sylvain’s and Felix’s steps on the cobblestone, blinded by the way the shoulders of their shadows brush and unbrush. Felix lets his gaze drift up to Sylvain like he hopes to find it mirrored; Sylvain doesn’t look at him, though, looks everywhere but at him, and Felix knows what’s going to happen before he witnesses it, somehow, as though watching from the theater balcony the tragic, foretold ending.

Sylvain’s voice wavers ever-so-slightly when he speaks, like he’s afraid of tainting the silence with too-harsh words.

“Do you remember when Glenn died?”

Felix remembers. He remembers playing ghost hunters with Dimitri in the Blaiddyd living-room, running hand in hand around his father’s expensive couches and trying to snipe Edelgard’s drink onto her dress with hair ties as she played the piano. He remembers the hair ties hitting Glenn in the face when he’d step into the room with Lambert and Patricia, the feeling of Glenn’s fingers against his ticklish sides as he’d crashed down over the both of them to teach them a lesson, Edelgard’s smaller hands joining in to pull at their hair and dump ice cubes down their shirts. He remembers Patricia bringing them all apart with a single word, and the sound of a car and Edelgard’s smile, and Dimitri’s sad, sad gaze. He remembers seeing Rodrigue leaving from the passenger side, and running out with Edelgard to beg their fathers to let them play a little longer, pretending that Sylvain and Ingrid were going to join in a few minutes, _I promise, dad, they’re just down the street_ — he remembers Rodrigue’s smile and sigh, the last one he’s ever given Felix, and the loving weigh of a palm on his head, and the worry slashing his face in half at the crash of broken glass and the distorted noise of tumbling piano keys. He remembers screams, and cries, and Glenn’s clear voice, and the fire, the fire, the fire.

He remembers running back into the house. He remembers Rodrigue’s shouts. He remembers Glenn’s last words.

“I remember when Dimitri _killed_ him, yeah,” he answers. He doesn’t need to say the rest; Sylvain can read all of it and more in the stare Felix cuts him.

“When Glenn died,” he insists, and annoyance creeps like tar into Felix’s lungs — because he did nothing but state the truth; it had been Dimitri who’d driven a dagger into Glenn’s heart even as Glenn told him _I forgive you, I forgive you_ , and it’d been Rodrigue who’d looked upon Lambert’s dead body and the burning curtains and the burning hem of Glenn’s clothes and chose to carry Dimitri’s tear-wrecked, post-possession frame out, even as Glenn was breathing what would come to be his last but shouldn’t have had to be — and when he looks at Sylvain again the words he utters are blurring into the sun.

“I don’t care about how Rodrigue felt,” Felix says, too quickly, too harshly, and Sylvain recoils like he’s been slapped, though Felix doesn’t find it in himself to care. “No one cared how _I_ felt, least of all my own father. Where are you going with this?”

“You asked me why Glenn was still dwelling here,” There’s a darkness to Sylvain’s reply, an unburied resentment thought to be long-dead. “And I’m going to tell you, but you have to listen to me.”

Felix doesn’t speak, which is as much a prompt to continue as Sylvain will get out of him, now.

Sylvain’s eyes drift bottom-left, like they do when he’s remembering, Felix has learnt to decipher. “It was a couple of years later, a few days before you turned seventeen.” A fonder smile breaks onto his face. “I was about to come over, to help you with your literature homework, I think. You were never good at reading between the lines.”

“Get on with it,” Felix shuts him down, and Sylvain’s features harshen in the setting sun.

“Right. Rodrigue told me off at the door, told me you were taking a nap, that I shouldn’t bother you. But he seemed… strange. On edge. The way Miklan used to when he was about to be possessed.”

Felix stops in his tracks, at that, a dozen words on his tongue left unsaid, and Sylvain turns back to him.

“So I snuck in through that hole in the backyard fence, the one we’d cut to go run to the lakes in the summer. Ripped my brand new coat on the edges, Mom screamed at me for weeks on end for that. And Rodrigue, he was in the kitchen. There was a woman — Cornelia, he called her, or something — hot in that I’m-going-to-kill-you-and-wear-your-guts-as-a-necklace kind of way. They… Felix, they were talking about you. How you’d make… an appropriate vessel.”

There’s buzzing overcoming Felix’s brain. He doesn’t think it comes from the flies or the mosquitos under the dock lights.

“I don’t know why they had the window half-opened in the middle of winter, but I’m glad they did. They went— upstairs, and I snuck in and I don’t even know how they didn’t hear me— I— I climbed the stairs to the first floor as quiet as I could, and Dimitri rushed from his room — your room — to tell me you were in danger, that Glenn was gone, that he couldn’t see his ghost anymore, but that he could feel _you_.”

The boats on the canal shake in the wind. Felix feels seasick.

“I looked through the keyhole, and you were sleeping on the carpet. There was Glenn’s coat over your shoulders, the way you used to sleep with it when you missed him most. There was Glenn’s dagger in Cornelia’s hands, and she started speaking. Next thing I knew, I was barging into the room, and I knocked Cornelia out of the way. She slashed at my shoulder with the dagger, and I screamed at Rodrigue while Dimitri was dragging you out by your ankles. And when I blinked again, Glenn was standing next to me.”

For a few seconds, Felix’s head is empty of any thought but the last thing Rodrigue had told him before they left, the voice rising crescendo in his mind until his feet make him walk again, fast, leading everywhere but here.

“Felix,” Sylvain calls, and he can feel his fingers brushing his wrist, and the feeling is unbearable, “are you oka—”

“Do you _think_ I’m okay?! Do you think I’m fucking okay, Sylvain?!” He hasn’t intended to shout that loud, and the leaves rustle harder in the wind to cover his voice.

“Sorry, that was stupid—”

“Yeah, it was! How the fuck do you think I’d react to you basically telling me that my own father tried to—” _erase me from existence, sacrifice me for his better-loved son, make it clear that he never loved me_ — “have me replaced by my own dead brother?!”

“That’s not—” Sylvain tries, his voice louder, too, like it’s trying to shush out Felix’s thoughts, “He told me he didn’t know, that he was sorry—”

“Wait, so he said this to _you_?! Not only did he say that— you believed him, and you fucking kept the secret for that long?” Felix’s laugh is as bitter as the wine they’d drank an hour ago, his hair flying into his eyes along the shake of his shoulders like a summoned storm. “So what— If I hadn’t asked, you would’ve never told me? You’d have lived with me, 24/7, knowing all of this and never telling me?!”

Sylvain’s voice throws the gleam of desperation over his features. “I wanted to, Felix, I swear—”

“Why didn’t you, then?! Wait, let me guess— because it made you feel better, didn’t it? It made you feel _so_ much better about yourself, knowing that you weren’t alone, right?”

Sylvain’s eyes sharpen like a ritual dagger, dark as shed blood. “What?”

He doesn’t deny it. It’s enough for Felix to go on. “Oh come on, Sylvain. Do you truly think, even now, that Miklan was possessed when he was beating you up? That it was a monster who was making him hate your fucking guts? That he was forced by some kind of supernatural being to push you down into that well and leave you alone in the mountains?”

Felix feels like the one possessed, now, that creature of self-hatred winding its nails into all the cracks in his bones as he looks at Sylvain’s face, eyes wide and short of breath. He looks like he’s just been slapped by one of his numerous dates, these girls and boys he used to play with that made Felix hate both him and himself. _Serves him right_ , something whispers inside him, a silver tongue curling like a curse, _I shouldn’t be the only one hurting, it’s not fair_ , and Felix hopes Sylvain will punch him or kiss him or kill him, all versions of the exact same desire.

“None of them ever loved you, Sylvain,” Felix says, “and if you can’t admit it to yourself and move on, you’re fucking delusional.”

The boats are swaying from side to side as he watches Sylvain, frozen in place, just as he realizes what he’s said, anger and regret and agony bleeding out of him in watercolor; but Sylvain’s face twists fake, fake, fake, as he smiles down at Felix, awful and crooked. “You’re right. Very nice of you to remind me how fucked up of me it’d be, to think I could _ever_ have anyone insane enough to love me, really. Especially my own family, right? Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’m going to go back.”

Sylvain passes him by like everything ever has — completely innocuous, never looking at him, never caring about how he feels about it, and it’s instinct and the fear of dying things that makes Felix reach for Sylvain’s arm, _That’s not true,_ he wants to scream, wants to throw to his face like purifying salts, _look at me, don’t leave me alone, fucking look at me_ —

“It’s okay, Fe,” Sylvain spits like a curse, the nickname venomous on his tongue, and Felix wonders if he’s said any of that out loud. “I get it, really. We’re finishing one last job, and then we’re finding Miklan, and when that’s over I’ll finally leave you the fuck alone, and you’ll _finally_ be rid of me, just like you always wanted.”

His voice is soft as a lover’s caress, and Felix wants to tear out the parts of his skin it’s touched. “Sylvain, I’m—”

 _I’m sorry_ , he tries to say, except the words can’t be heard, drowned in the sudden sound of splashing water and a deafening roar.

All he sees is a mass of rotten seaweed like coagulated body parts swiping at Sylvain’s feet, bog-green eyes staring right through him, and Sylvain’s gold, gold gaze looking straight at Felix as he’s dragged underwater.

 _Not this, not the water, Sylvain’s scared of water_ , is Felix’s only thought before he rushes and dives into the canal.

There’s a cloud of crimson like watered-down paint when he opens his eyes, the sight of a gash into Sylvain’s side, dark green winding around his throat tighter and tighter, oxygen bubbling out of his mouth in sickly pale pink, and the _draugen_ tries to claw Felix in half when he reaches for Sylvain, blades of beer-bottle green slashing through mud and grime. Felix ducks out of the way, but the rush of water makes his movements sloppy, his arm catching on a piece of iron and almost cutting the skin— Sylvain looks white, so, so white like an exposed bone, and there are no bubbles anymore, and Felix wrenches the iron bar free before driving it into what he hopes is the draugen’s throat. The beast screams, a gurgled noise like screeching metal, and Felix’s feet kick up at a loose cobblestone when he drives his hands through the algae and whatever the hell it’s made of— the creature lets go of Sylvain as Felix drags its bulbous, sea-soaked head out of the water, and Felix’s hand reaches for the stone and drives it against the draugen’s skull to the beating of his own screams, blood and rot and sludge gushing out and splattering his face as he bashes its soft skull in again and again and again until it stops struggling.

He doesn’t know how long it takes to drag Sylvain out of the water — too long, his brain tells him, too fucking long — and his fingers pump across his chest, try and beat Death out of his lungs. _Don’t die_ , he says to nothing and no one and Sylvain, _don’t you_ dare _die on me_ — and it feels like he’s looking at himself from above, somehow, like he’s already done this exact thing before, like he will do it, one day, in an ancient life yet to come. His thumbs reach to tilt Sylvain’s face up and slide his mouth open, and as he’s about to breathe in he feels Sylvain breathe out, relief splashing into him like the water Sylvain coughs up in his face, and Felix holds him against his chest, his tears mingling with the river dripping from Sylvain’s clothes and transmuting it into saltwater, his throat raw from the sobs he screams.

***

Someone’s following him.

They’re doing a terrible job of it, too. Felix can notice their shadow in the fuzzy reflection of the store windows he walks by, a small, slithering thing like flashfire. Just their luck Felix has nothing of value on him; the plastic bag in his hand crinkles as it beats against his leg, the medication and groceries inside drumming against each other to the rhythm, a couple of kroner jingling in time inside the pocket of his jeans. Felix turns the wrong way on purpose, tries to lose them through the straight, paved streets he’s come to learn by heart in the month they’ve spent here, waiting for Sylvain to properly heal up, sewing him back up himself in their camper before bringing him to the first hospital he’d spotted, making a considerable dent in both their emergency funds because they didn’t have their European healthcare IDs. He keeps his normal, if a little fast, pace, though he knows there is not impasse or dark alley where he can corner them on the way to the flat he’s rented online, a cozy hideout of clean floorboards and a single bedroom, too expensive for what it is. The person keeps up — it’s annoying like a persistent, intrusive thought, their footsteps willfully irregular in a bid not to get spotted and managing the exact opposite, and Felix turns, brusque and sudden, makes a run for the glass door of the building, doesn’t turn to check if he’s lost them until he’s climbed the stairs four by four and fumbled one too many seconds with the key in the lock and when he tries to close the door there’s a foot blocking it out. Sylvain is up from where he was lying on the couch in half-a-second, hand reaching for Felix’s dagger as Felix tells him to hurry the _fuck_ up, to help him block the door—

“Felix Hugo Fraldarius!!”

Felix hasn’t heard this voice in more than six months, melodious even in its anger, and he’s stunned into silence as he steps back into the room, the door opening again before it slams close in a perfect imitation of his friend’s irritation.

“Annette? What the fuck?!”

Annette huffs, cheeks peach-annoyed, fluffed like a red, wet bird. There’s sweat glistening along her round face, her hair flying undone over her skylight eyes. “Oh, so that’s how you greet your best friend after half a year away? Thanks for almost cutting my foot off, by the way.” She shakes her leg a little, a flicker of pain flashing across her face like a cinema reel, and a hint of guilt drowns Felix’s heart.

“How did you even find us?”

“Oh, please.” She flips ginger locks across her shoulder in a way that’s too reminiscent of Ingrid for comfort. “You know me. I’m nothing if not thorough, and there’s only so many stories about two young men stumbling upon dead things before someone can trace a map.”

Sylvain laughs with the levity and buoyancy Felix is so used to hearing, telltale of the fact that he’s better. They’ll soon be able to take the road again, if Annette lets them go. He lays the dagger onto the console table, tucks it unseen beneath a ragcloth. “Speaking of thorough, I’m surprised Ingrid’s not here with you. She doesn’t usually send negotiators to deal with our bullshit.”

“She doesn’t know.” Annette’s eyes send stalactites through the both of them as she stares them down. “Mercie’s keeping her busy back home. Luckily for you, by the way, because if she _was_ here, you wouldn’t be talking to me. Well, you wouldn’t even be talking at all, because she’d be too busy _killing_ you for leaving unannounced.” Felix looks at Sylvain and is almost surprised to see him look back at him and mirror his expression, a knowing glance rife with glazed-over half-shame. “It was okay, the first couple months, we all thought you guys had _finally_ eloped or something—”

“ _Eloped_?!” Sylvain strangles out at the same time Felix croaks, “ _Finally_?”

Felix would think Annette was ignoring them hadn’t she turned her gaze to Felix, snow eyes heated with pity and probably a little bit of disgust. “So imagine our surprise when the cops dropped out my door to question me about whether my ‘two brothers’, whom I’d never heard of before, would be capable of _murder_.”

Felix is about to ask what the hell she’s talking about, but Sylvain cuts him off with a swear and a stare to the plush carpet under his naked feet. “Fuck. The cook.”

Felix immediately remembers blue, dug-out eyes and golden hair and Sylvain’s voice. _Basile_ , he’d said to the waitress, _Basile Dominic_ , and there’s a thousand apologies threatening to spill over Felix’s tongue as he watches Annette, her features twisted by incomprehension and begging for an explanation.

“Seriously, guys. What is going on?”

Sylvain lies a hand over her head, pats it in acknowledgement; there’s a thunderbolt along his side when his shirt rides up his hips, puffed up and crisscrossed like a children’s tic-tac-toe game, dotted with Felix’s attempts at keeping dear life into him. “Sit down,” he tells her, soft and brotherly, not an order but an invitation, “it’s a long story to tell.”

The Sylvain Felix knows vanishes, replaced by another version, the one who’s best at telling truths and lies and stories. Felix puts a kettle on the stove of the open kitchen, fills a teapot with loose leaves of rose-flavored black tea, dried-up petals reshaping themselves under the lull of simmering water and the music of Sylvain’s words. He tells her everything, mostly; he explains about Miklan’s possession when they were young, and how his father threw him out of the Gautier household, after one too many times of letting the monster in him take over and take it out on Sylvain; he relates the tale of the night they left everything behind, and the months a little before that, the camper he’d bought and the words he’d told Felix to get him to leave with him; he mentions the Fraldariuses, the things Glenn could see and the things Felix cannot; he recounts the number of creatures they’ve killed, starting with the first, back in that stone quarry, and glazing over the last like on a pretty cake, that incident that had led to them staying here for a while.

He doesn’t tell her about Glenn, or about their fight, or about how he’d died a little. It’s for the best, Felix figures, if they want Annette to leave them be.

“Sylvain,” Annette ends up speaking, soft like an incantation. “The cops think you’ve _killed_ people.”

Felix cannot remember ever killing any human being but their former selves.

“We haven’t,” Sylvain answers, and he’s certain Annette can see it’s the full truth, this time. “I swear to you, Annette, we haven’t. We’ve been protecting— people, towns, probably even more than we think. The things we’ve killed — they aren’t people, Annette.”

“In that case, what about Miklan? Isn’t he a person?”

Sylvain’s breath catches in his lungs, a sound Felix has often wished to hear, though in other circumstances.

“What are you going to do when you see him? What if he’s back to being that— that monster you’ve feared for so long? Are you going to kill him, too?”

“Annette,” Felix warns, a protective, contralto snarl.

“Don’t you realize you guys won’t be able to come back?!” Annette’s voice rises high in the living-room as she stares up at Felix, unwavering, beautifully strong. “There’s a warrant going around the country. All our friends have to pretend they don’t know you. The Gautiers are giving away a _thousand_ bucks to anyone who’ll bring Sylvain home.”

“We’re not coming back.”

Felix is surprised the words come from him, trickle out of his own mouth — though perhaps he shouldn’t be; perhaps the decision had been made all along, back when he’d seen Sylvain’s freckles bathed in low midnight light, crinkled under the lines laughter drew across his face, back when he’d bowed for Felix to take his rightful place in the passenger side of the mustard-yellow camper.

“We’re not coming back,” Felix repeats, thinking of home in faked fluorescent constellations and ratty mattresses and the weight of Sylvain next to him. “I’m sorry, Annette. We’ve decided that a long time ago.”

“You’ll _die_ out there.”

“We’ll die most anywhere,” Sylvain says, shuts her down with a warm hand brushing back her hair as he cradles her against his chest, the couch cushions sighing when they sag against them. “Everything dies, Annie. Is it wrong to live however we want to before that?”

“Wonderful,” she answers, the weight of sarcasm an alto note on her tongue. “A life chasing dead and dying things until you die with each other. Absolutely fairy-tale worthy.”

 _But that was always the goal, wasn’t it_ , Felix thinks when Sylvain glances up at him — dying together, fulfilling that stupid promise they’d made under summer stars so many years ago.

“Not forever,” Sylvain laughs. “I swear, after I’ve found Miklan, I’ll settle down somewhere nice and you’ll visit every summer. You can bring Mercie, and Ingrid — tell her I’ll buy her a horse, or something. That’ll make her forgive me. I hope.”

“And you?”

Annette looks right through him, Felix feels, looks down to tear his heart out from his ribs and consume it until she’s understood everything about him, until she’s seen firsthand Felix’s reason for living this way. _Are you going to live alongside him_ , Annette seems to ask in the quiet of her gaze, _or are you going to tell him and scramble back to us after he’s realized he doesn’t need you?_

“I’ll take the camper,” he answers, because that’s what home is to him now — the drum of wheels on tar, the trickling crackle of the radio, the thrill of the kill. “And I’ll drive.”

“Hopeless, the both of you.” Annette sighs in hard-fought defeat, gets out of Sylvain’s arms to flop down on the couch all of her own. “Can I at least… stay for a bit? I missed you guys. We could go sightseeing?”

So they go sightseeing. They don’t find it in their hearts to deny her, not after she’s come so far to try and knock some long-forgotten sense into them, let her sleep on the couch for an entire week as they both see more of the city than they have in an entire month. They insist they pay for all her expenses, they even take her to the amusement park in the middle of the city, where Felix chooses to deny he screams on every rollercoaster while Annette and Sylvain are laughing their asses off. At night, Felix keeps whispering the same apologies he whispers since that evening, even when he knows Sylvain can hear; Sylvain’s gaze is softer, when he does, is softest when he repeats them back, when he buries his nose into Felix’s hair to shut back the tears, when Felix indulges into the accidental brush of lips against his neck.

When they give back the keys to the flat a week later and drive Annette back to the airport, she kisses them on both cheeks, lingers into Felix’s arms for a little longer.

“Felix?” she whispers, song-soft.

“Hm?”

A deep breath, like surfacing. “I… I really do hope that you’re happy.”

His only answer is to kiss her brow, to soothe locks of hair out of her eyes, to choose not to look back when they leave her in the middle of the parking lot.

***

The camper breaks down.

It was only a matter of time, if Felix is being perfectly realistic; the only tools they both know how to wield are those they now make their living with, the knives and the saws and the occasional hunting rifles they manage to bargain off shady memorabilia country festivals, rusted with time and crested with hatred. They are the proud owners of a single screwdriver they’ve once lost in the eye of a random, feral shapeshifter, which Glenn’s shadow had somehow brought back all nice and caked with blood on the nightstand one morning, and the only lug wrench they’d bought had somehow broken in half the last time Sylvain had tried to change a tire, so Felix now stands on the side of the road trying to hail random drivers for help and parts while Sylvain wipes his face of the grime and oil he’s spread over his skin, leftovers of when his hands have dug into the hood’s guts and pulled out sad, burnt remains of metal. Red and black stripe his white shirt in uneven tie dyes as he thumbs at the hem and uses it to clean himself, the edge riding up and baring the lines of toned muscle carved upon his stomach, vertical reminders of hunger and thirst and inexorable summer when Felix’s eyes too-consciously follow them upstream — his skin has tanned and freckled over the sunburns, and Sylvain spends so much time shirtless this season that the slight sliver of undress feels more licentious than the usual sight he makes when Felix wakes in the morning, carelessly exposed onto the sheets they’ve come to share over the months.

Sylvain moves his hands back into the engine as though he knows exactly what he’s doing; Felix knows better, knows that for all of Sylvain’s dedication to try and pull his weight, he’s as clueless about cars and mechanics as Felix ever was, had to try for his driver’s licence three times over because he couldn’t be bothered to check for oil and whatever other stupid liquids flow through a car’s guts. His black-lacquered fingers card dark through his hair, blazing blood under the late summer sun; they bring out the red in his eyes when he wipes across them with his wrist, burning scarlet sentences into Felix’s lungs, a charcoal death row for the little oxygen that remains. Cold drips at the corner of Felix’s mouth as he watches, a sticky phantom from one of the last ice lollies they’d thought of buying once they’d made their way back south, pooling into the shore of his collarbone where one of Sylvain’s oversized shirts falls off Felix’s shoulder — and Sylvain’s glance turns into a stare, annoyance — it must be annoyance — palpable in the turn of his lips as the ice melts down under another shirt that’ll end up irreversibly stained.

Felix has always tried never to make mistakes. He wonders if it would be one, to ask Sylvain to come taste frost off of his skin.

 _What_ , he asks instead, but before Sylvain has time to answer or move, there’s a slowing motor noise and a glance of widening pink like an inflating bubblegum — the sports car comes to a stop as the window rolls down, and a head of equally vibrant pink hair peeks out of the door.

“Need any help?”

The stranger’s smile is full of encouragement and too much niceness for either of them to trust, Felix knows, but desperate times must call for desperate measures, because Sylvain all but saunters towards the car with that expression he weaves over his features that makes almost everybody give him almost everything. The car parks in front of their camper, the juxtaposition a sore, technicolor sight amongst the muted grays and natural greens of the road around them; Holst, is what its driver introduces himself as when he digs into the camper with large, deft hands. He’s tall, though no taller than Sylvain, albeit a little broader around the shoulders in a way Felix hadn’t realized was possible before, chestnut roots peeking like spider legs out of rosé-wine hair falling into grey eyes. His fingers seem to find something into the mess of parts, because he makes a little exclamation, raises his head to smile at them, triumphant, innocent.

“Broken belt,” he says.

“What the hell is that,” Felix replies.

Holst launches into an explanation Felix does not bother listening to, too-intently watching Sylvain instead for a telltale sign, a cursory glance that Felix would know means they’re in the presence of a threat. His posture is strangely relaxed, however, loose at the edges like wind-swept drapes, his expression open, sun-showered; when he looks at Felix, he throws him a wink and a cheery, cherry smile.

“Lucky for you, I have a spare belt at home,” Holst says as he slams the hood close, swipes of oil painting his nails. “I can fix you up if you stay put.”

Sylvain’s laughter is that airy, two-toned lullaby that loops in Felix’s mind on the nights he cannot sleep. “We don’t have much of a choice, do we?”

Holst snorts, good-natured, like he doesn’t mind being outsmarted. “Very fair. I’ll be back in a few,” and the sound of his car door closing and of his engine starting muffles any other word he might speak.

It’s mostly months of fusional cohabitation that have Sylvain answer Felix’s interrogations before he utters them to life. “He seems decent. And Glenn thinks he’s super hot.”

“Great. So now we trust people solely based on how attractive my dead brother thinks they are.” Felix glares in what he thinks is Glenn’s general direction, before Sylvain’s hair ruffles itself in rough curls on the opposite side, and Felix groans in annoyance as he slides the camper door open and lets it bang back closed.

It takes another hour for Holst to come back. Felix spends it scrolling for possible targets on obscure forums; Sylvain spends it in front of the electric fan that’s recently taken residence on their foldable kitchen table; Glenn apparently spends it screaming at an old lady ghost nearby to stop fucking singing, according to Sylvain’s complaints. Holst, annoyingly, chooses to pop back at the exact moment when Felix was about to tell Sylvain he was right not to having trusted Holst and that he’d told him so; he’s further annoyed by the glances Holst steals at Sylvain’s now bare chest when Sylvain opens the hood again and settles against the side, watching through longer red locks as Holst works his hands through the gears and cables. Holst is done in a matter of minutes, even as he teaches Sylvain the way to replace parts and check for oil and other stuff Felix isn’t interested in; _Do you know anywhere we could have dinner nearby_ , Sylvain asks when he somehow overhears Felix’s stomach growl from a couple meters away, and when Holst offers his own place, none of them decline.

They follow the pink sports car to what looks like one of the numerous houses Felix’s rich neighbors used to own on the coast, all bay windows and dug-in pool and flowered backyard; Holst signals them to park their camper onto a patch of grass near the lined-up pine trees before he parks his own car, and Felix is about to pop out the door when another storm of pink whirlwinds out of the door to lay down on the poolside bed even though it’s past six, long hair swaying in the wind when she removes her sunglasses—

“Oh fuck. Oh no.”

Sylvain raises an eyebrow in Felix’s direction, but Felix’s eyes are glued to what is without a doubt Hilda fucking Goneril. Felix struggles to think any other sentence than _what the fuck is she doing here_ , before he remembers she took particular care in making sure everybody knew her family had a summer house near the mountains in a bid to have their freshmen welcoming party near a place where she would be comfortable enough to crash. The sigh he lets out is long and weary.

“We were in my design school together. I _know_ she’s going to recognize me.”

“Fe,” Sylvain tries, reassuring as the hand he lays on his thigh. “You dropped out of that school six months in. That was like, what — five years ago?”

“Maybe, but it’s _Hilda_ ,” Felix insists, as though it explains anything.

Sylvain laughs like he knows something Felix doesn’t. “I doubt girls find you _that_ unforgettable.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Aww, without you?”

Felix thinks Sylvain deserves the light hit in the arm he gets.

“Don’t worry,” Sylvain says again with too much laughter in his voice, making the camper air too stuffy for Felix’s liking, and when he leans in closer and closer, his hand steadying near Felix’s door handle, Felix breathes in pine trees and sunlight. “If worse comes to worst, I’ll find a way to distract her.”

Felix’s mind is a traitor to Felix’s heart, he decides when he notices — notices that Sylvain’s close enough that their noses may brush if he sat straighter. Pinned back like this, Felix cannot truly look at anything but Sylvain’s face, framed with the auburn of autumn leaves as his hair falls disheveled across his forehead to ghost along Felix’s skin at every gust of wind, his gaze molten bronze like a forged blade, lips opened on a flirty smile and a snippet of breathlessness like a suspended promise, and Felix lets himself linger there as he imagines once more what Sylvain’s mouth would feel like against every edge of his body and every curve of his soul.

“With what? Your shining personality? Your heavy flirting?” Felix asks, but there’s no bite to it, not when he’s secretly measured the weight of Sylvain and the weight of the world on the same equal scale each time he’s looked at him during the last months, not when the almost-pressure of Sylvain’s body reminds him that they’re somehow still alive.

Sylvain utterly ignores him, a hand reaching for a loose strand of hair, too close to Felix’s face and not close enough all at once. “Your hair grew longer anyway.” Sylvain must mistake the sharp intake of breath that passes Felix’s lips for agreement, because he twirls the lock around an idle finger, brings it closer into view. “Where does it reach now — below your shoulderblades, probably?”

“Dunno,” he replies. “I haven’t kept track.”

“I have.” Sylvain’s irises are sharp citrine in the declining sunlight coming through the window, rough-cut and shining along the facets when he looks back into Felix’s eyes, long eyelashes fluttering as he blinks down and stares a little lower and a lot where Felix _wants_ , has wanted for so long—

There’s the slam of a car door outside, and Sylvain jumps back a few inches, the distance of rejection. “I- I can’t open my door. Parked too close to the trees. Reached out to open yours. Sorry.” His words are machine-gun bullets, spat out, rhythmless, and Felix opens the door and runs away like a wolf from forest fire.

Sylvain slides out as Holst gestures at Hilda-fucking-Goneril to come closer; her eyes trace Felix’s shape as though she’s studying an anatomical model, dissecting every limb and organ with the precision of a very talented surgeon.

“This is Hilda— my sister. We’re here on vacation. Hilda, this is... Hey, I never caught your names, have I?”

“Hugo,” Felix says in a rush as he shakes Hilda’s hand.

“ _Enchantée_ ,” Hilda says, light and affected and knowing as her smile.

Sylvain, or Simon, as he’s introduced himself to the Gonerils, takes no time jumping into the pool and chatting about whatever Hilda has decided they’ll chat about, fortunately; Felix is left being forced to ask Holst if he can help with cooking in fear of appearing impolite to their host, curse his awkward ministrations in the kitchen, and rely on Glenn’s ghost to pass him the ingredients he fails to cut each time Holst has his back turned or his eyes closed in laughter. Hilda’s pool-wet frame drips into the kitchen to get a bottle of rosé wine from the fridge, footsteps light as she pecks Holst on the cheek more to give him trouble and dry herself on his shirt — _but big bro_ , she says, an affectionate term of aggravation when Holst tells her that it’s also for their parents, _they don’t come back until eleven, and Simon’s thirsty_ , and Holst groans in defeat as Felix snorts.

He wonders if Glenn and he could somehow be this close if his brother were still alive, or at least, visible.

The salad bowl they put on the garden table is full of Felix’s misshapen tomatoes and Holst’s perfectly cut cucumbers and watermelon. Hilda puts half the slices of mozzarella in her plate, tearing basil leaves over the lettuce with her bare hands, which Felix takes as a cue to eat the prosciutto slices with his fingers while Sylvain looks on half-amused, half-scandalized. They don’t leave any wine for Holst and Hilda’s parents.

The blanket Felix has draped over the camper’s roof trickles down the sides in fringes when Sylvain steps out of the Goneril house. It’s a tradition Sylvain had started to instate during the warmest summer days, a way for him to enjoy the cool of nighttime as they aired out the camper, resting his head over the pillows as he read books or played mobile games. Felix had been reluctant to join him at first — the only time he’d done so, the very first time, he’d laid back to sleep that night with a dozen more mosquito bites adorning his body parts in bracelets, but Sylvain had then made an effort to buy repellent incense during each grocery run and Felix had no excuse not to join him, alone together in the peace and quiet of their swirling thoughts and their silent distractions.

Sylvain climbs over the hood and onto the roof, slips onto his stomach next to Felix before rolling over on his back in accidental closeness.

“How was dishwashing duty?”

“Wet,” Sylvain answers. “Hilda took revenge by half-drenching me into soap water, so now Glenn is trying to do the same to Holst, somehow.” Felix lets his gaze flume along the drying drops freckling Sylvain’s shirt, lets it ride along the road of Sylvain’s collarbones. He’s close enough that Felix can decipher all the veins, sinuous roads overviewed from a small plane window, curling into the mountains of his body. Moonglow fragments dance across twin sunset pools when he looks up into Sylvain’s eyes, and all the songs he’s ever heard and all the poems he’ll ever read are about this, are about him. Felix wonders, suddenly, if his existence will ever become a paramount piece of Sylvain’s soul the way Sylvain is to his, if he’ll one day turn into the very air he breathes, filling his lungs and chest and heart in invisible compulsions until Sylvain’s life depends on his very presence.

It’s a selfish thought, one he tucks away out of habit.

“Well, it’s your fault for dragging her with you.”

Sylvain’s laugh strains like a wet washcloth. “Yeah. I guess it is, huh?”

His gaze is careful as he looks at Felix — Felix can see it in the way his tongue runs over a smooth, fake smile, his teeth nipping at the sun-bitten plump of his bottom lip, unshorn from kilometers travelled in the warmth Summer wears like a cloak. The heat has never quite bothered Felix, used to holidays spent under the Mistral-whipped sun of the coast; but Sylvain was all ice, as though his father had crafted him for the very glaciers around the Gautier secondary house in a bid to withstand any and all aggressions that may come his way, thawed by nothing and no one. “... I’m sorry,” Sylvain says, eyes looking up to the sky again. “About what I said back in Copenhagen. Well, more about how I said it. I wanted to tell you before, but—” A sigh, weary and a tiny bit relieved Felix is no longer mad at him, probably. At least, that’s what Felix can decipher from it; he’s always been good at listening between Sylvain’s breathed unwords. “I thought… Trying to find Miklan, having at least an explanation, even the least rational one— that it would give me… I don’t know, closure. I was still thinking that it could be true. That he didn’t _want_ to do this to me.”

Felix shrugs. “I told you. I didn’t really mean what I said. I just… didn’t want to be the only one hurting.”

“But you _meant_ it, Fe.” Sylvain’s voice wavers at the edges, combative, solicitous, the slightest chip in the glassy surface of his detached tone, scores on a lake frozen over. “And I know now. It’s— It’s more like I’ve always known, and never wanted to admit it to myself. Miklan… He was never possessed by a monster, or a ghost, or some ungodly stuff like that. It was just _him_ , who did all of this to me. And somehow, that realization hurt more than any of the things he’d ever put me through.”

“But this _isn’t_ your fault. It’s not.” Felix turns on his side, his fingers reaching to seize Sylvain’s jaw the way one seizes Chance, his grip strong and gentle enough to turn Sylvain’s face towards him. “He was the one who told you he was possessed, because he was a coward and a piece of shit who didn’t want to own up to what he was doing to you in front of others — who wanted to find dumb justifications to his irrational hatred. It never was you.”

Sylvain’s dismissal takes the graceful shape of a hand prying Felix’s back down, of a profile painted in crimson turning back its gaze to the heavens. “You know, I still don’t get what made you follow me.” Shadows of stars streak Sylvain’s face in silver, shapeless spirits of an abandoned past and a forgotten future, and Felix focuses on the present of Sylvain’s dusk eyes staring up and into the abyss of his restless thoughts. “You could’ve said no, you know. You even could have turned back, the first few months. I wouldn’t have blamed you.” When Sylvain’s gaze finds his again, he reads into Felix like a well-loved book, dog-eared at the torn edges yellowed by unforgiving time. “So why?”

 _I love you_ , Felix wants to say, like a curse, like a hex, candleflame through his veins and hot wax in his lungs as he carves messy circles over Sylvain’s palm, subconscious preparation for an invocation of his infatuation.

“I love the road,” Felix utters instead, the flutter of his admission leaving bitter dregs of unfiltered emotion grounds like dust on his tongue.

Sylvain whispers over a huff of half-laughter, a relieved sigh abruptly cut in two by the filed edge of bladelike words. “The road.” His fingers curl over Felix’s like waves curl into cliffs, brush them in ebbs and flows until they fit together, sun-warmed water filling in the cracks of his salt-scoured palms. They inscribe shivers onto Felix’s skin as they trail up, burning cold, along his arm, trace the scars there with the sedulous reverence of a student running fingertips over the imprints of an antique book, until they tuck Felix’s hair back like one turns an annotated page — and it’s an urge, a gut reaction, that makes Felix reach for Sylvain’s hand and push it down into his hair, a tongue-tied, breathless permission that infuses a too-loud inhale into Sylvain’s lungs, that drives Sylvain to pull until his ponytail loosens underneath his touch, that compels Felix to fall back and bare his throat.

When he opens his eyes, Sylvain is close enough to kiss; there’s patience and restraint in the way the tip of his nose brushes Felix’s, another soundless request for indulgence. It’s a good enough reason for Felix to reach up himself.

It’s a slow, slow death. The best kind. The gentle press of Sylvain’s lips feels so strangely familiar, as though replicating the scenario Felix had entertained for so many years to the perfect letter; it tastes of spring mornings and an adult fantasy come true, one that Felix wants to take apart and make better, realer. Felix kisses the caution and softness out of him, has Sylvain’s hand curling into his nape when he runs white teeth along the plum plush of his lips until Sylvain answers in kind, as though he wants to taste every flavor of feeling Felix has to offer — _all of them_ , Felix thinks, _I’d give you all of them_ , and when Sylvain pulls Felix on top of him as he curls nonsensical words along Felix’s tongue, Felix stops thinking altogether, lets the feel of his fingers burying into darkened crimson do the talking. There’s a moan tearing out of Sylvain’s throat, something base and ancient that he breathes right into Felix’s mouth. It makes Felix wish he could kiss the life out of him, if that would make him his to keep.

Bleary artificial spotlights burn to life when the garden gate opens, and Sylvain tears away from him as though released from a curse. Felix turns his head to watch another sports car park on the spot next to Holst’s car, sees Holst and Hilda step out to greet their parents in a storm of laughter and light and life. He overhears Hilda and Holst introducing them as college friends, once again cementing in Felix’s mind the fact that Hilda definitely knows who he is; he gives her a little more credit than he did back then, for not having asked questions, regardless of what her over-curious mind certainly has screamed at her to do. They walk up to the camper, still, and Felix tries his best to pretend he isn’t seated onto Sylvain’s lap and was busy depriving him of oxygen mere moments ago.

“Do you guys wanna come play board games with us?” Hilda asks; in the contrejour, her smug smirk is proof enough that he’s barely managing.

“Maybe later?” Sylvain speaks through a strained, bashful smile when he looks down to the Gonerils, his eyes flickering like dying stars between Felix and their hosts. “We have to finish— planning for our trip.”

“Yeah,” Felix says, a little too loud. “Planning for our trip.”

“Planning for your trip,” Hilda repeats.

“Planning for our trip.” Felix confirms, and when Sylvain promises Holst they’ll join them later, the only thing that manages to conceal her laughter is the sound of footsteps on gravel.

“I'm sorry,” Sylvain says when the outer lights turn off, and for a moment it stings almost like a rejection, a single slash of an ornate dagger through the length of his throat along his windpipe, red and dead and cold, until Felix sees the haze of smoky topaz coloring Sylvain’s gaze and bleeding hot in the space between them. “I think they’re gone now.”

Felix thinks he might stop breathing entirely. “So they are.”

“They’re lovely people.” Sylvain soothes circles with his thumb along Felix’s jawline, as though he could blur Felix’s broken edges with his own, as though Felix could not cut him open in the process, as though it would not matter at all if he did anyway. “But now that I've started this, I… don't want to stop.”

“Yeah,” and Felix sighs deliverance and desperation and devotion against Sylvain's lips as he leans back in. “Me neither.”

That night, Sylvain curls his fingers into Felix’s ponytail as Felix’s back uncurls from Sylvain’s chest, a god pulling on threads of nighttime to make it last longer, bares Felix’s throat to lips and tongue and teeth when he sinks into him; Felix’s hand shapes ghostly heat onto the window closest to their bed, where he’d let the glass cool his feverish forehead just minutes before, Sylvain now tracing the same patterns he had painted between Felix’s thighs across Felix’s carotid when he fucks him fast and deep. Felix’s other hand buries into Sylvain’s hair and unearths sighs and soughs and songs from the perfect, perfect lips he can see reflected in refracted reds into the window, and when he turns to kiss him the slight shift of their bodies makes Felix gasp against his mouth — Sylvain bites his smirk into the pulp of Felix’s lower lip, soothes the burn of his teeth and the drag of his cock with names like healing incantations, _sweetheart, angel, Felix, Felix, Felix_.

“Do you— Is it—” Felix tries, words failing like they so often do with him as Sylvain’s hand fists his dick and teases the head, thumb pressing just below in the exact way Felix likes best, and Felix settles for _faster_ and _harder_ and _Sylvain_ ; the shape of Sylvain’s name on Felix’s tongue makes Sylvain listen and comply in a way the other two haven’t, and Felix closes his eyes as Sylvain’s voice staccatoes sparks across his bare shoulder in goosebumps, _yes, so good, you’re so good, amazing, I love it, I love y—_ Felix’s climax crashes through him as he kisses the sentence out of Sylvain’s mouth, pulls it inside his chest for safekeeping when Sylvain engraves his claim in fingerprints into Felix’s thighs and comes deep inside him.

Felix follows Sylvain like a moth follows flames, falling back against the mattress. They’ll probably need to buy another, soon — Felix has the feeling they’ll end up wearing it out to rags and torn-out cotton fluff as the months go by. His side already has a dent where his body tosses and turns; it’s the excuse he uses to curl against Sylvain’s side, to wrap his hands around Sylvain’s waist, to breathe into Sylvain’s neck. _You’re gonna be the death of me_ , Sylvain says as he kisses the marks he’s bitten into Felix’s throat, and Felix prays to every demon he knows that Sylvain is going to keep this promise, too.

***

“You know, I ask myself this every time— why the hell do cryptids always live in dark woods? Or dirty caves? Or old manors? Abandoned hospitals? I just want _one_ job in a clean, pretty, luminous penthouse, is that too much to ask?”

Felix doesn’t answer. He doubts Sylvain will blame him; Felix knows Sylvain’s rambling is more a pointless way to alleviate Felix’s anxiety rather than a legitimate interrogation he has, a solution against the suffocating emptiness that surrounds them as they walk deeper into the cospe. Sylvain settles like autumn in the reddening trees, the carmine of his hair bleeding over the carpet of fallen leaves their footsteps bite into, wood cracking as though surrendering to the steady flame of a campfire. The whistle of wild birds and the wind carries them along uncharted paths, far from where they’d parked their camper, near the tamed part of the grove where parents come to pick flowers with their children and couples visit for a stroll. They’ve been walking for the better part of an hour, Felix surmises from the way the shaded sun moves over the vermillion roof the tree branches build far above their heads; to anyone else, it look like a beautiful, romantic excursion, if they took care not to notice the cleaver shining glimmers against the fabric of Sylvain’s pants, if they omitted to remark on Felix’s trusted dagger.

They’d driven to the region because of a news article — a search warrant for a blonde, blue-eyed man, in his early-to-mid twenties, suspected of graverobbing and accused of abducting and killing over a dozen people over the course of a year. The bodies had been found two weeks ago in the same place, some of them fresh still, their eyes gouged out and their limbs covered in gashes, cut into with a sharp blade; most of the corpses, however, had been dead for a few years to a decade, their descriptions corresponding to people buried in graves that had been desecrated all over the continent. The blurry, gas station-camera picture that had been featured on the website showed a tall, hulking man, long light hair matted in greyscale over his forehead, a fur-lined coat draping his shoulders.

 _It could be the Boar_ , Felix had said, and even as his face curdled in displeasure at the slur, Sylvain had answered, _then let’s find out_.

“Fe,” Sylvain says when Felix hasn’t answered the latest rhetorical question he wasn’t paying attention to, “do you really think Dimitri could have done it?”

That makes Felix stop in his cautious steps; he remembers how Dimitri had left the Fraldarius household a day after his 18th birthday, with nothing but a letter — not to Rodrigue, but to Felix, a sprawling apology scrawled over pages and pages. _I don’t deserve to be here_ , it said, _not while I still let them take over_. Felix still doesn’t know exactly what he was talking about; he knew about the spirits using Dimitri’s body to play pranks on him when they were children, about the souls Dimitri let live a fragment of long-lost life through his own out of selfless, foolish compassion. Felix had often lost sleep over a single question, ever-swirling in his mind: if spirits and ghosts were all good people, like Dimitri had so often insisted, then what kind of entity had worn his skin when Dimitri had killed his parents and Felix’s brother?

“No,” Felix answers, barely a whisper over the birdsongs. “I only think that… Whatever entity plagues him, if it plagues him still, even now— He deserves to be freed from that. He needs to find peace, whatever shape it may take. And if I can somehow apologize for how I’ve treated him and bring him mercy, even if I need to plunge a dagger in his heart… It’s my duty to do it.”

Sylvain’s arms snake around him, hold him against his chest as he brushes Felix’s bangs away from where they fell into his eyes. “Always so dramatic. For all we know, he’s living in a cottage in the countryside surrounded by chickens and vegetable gardens.” There’s a press of lips against his neck, one that Felix falls back into with a sigh. “And after we find him? After… that. What will you do?”

It’s natural as the sun rises and sets, the way Felix turns around and hooks his arms around Sylvain’s neck, practiced and inevitable. “Then… We can get that house that you wanted. Buy Ingrid her stupid apology horse. Invite our friends over every summer.”

Sylvain laughs, the sound brushing Felix’s forehead before he leaves a kiss there, soft as a feather. “So you wanna settle down? No chasing after shadows and monsters and gods anymore? Are you sure you won’t regret it?”

Felix tastes the hum on his tongue like he tastes the question, thinks of star-lit nights pushing Sylvain down into the ratty mattress, thinks of heat-hazy days and the thrumming of wheels over tar, recalls the rush of blood and adrenaline flooding his brain and reminding him he’s so, so alive when he buries his dagger into another murderous monster. Sylvain’s thumb traces his cheek and the corner of his lips.

“I love the road,” he says, like he did back then. “But I love you more.”

Sylvain thumbs Felix’s mouth open, and he licks into him, turns Felix’s heart and soul inside out.

Warmth floods him when they part, a dam breaking, and Felix drinks in the sound of Sylvain’s breathing and the quiet of the world around them.

The quiet of the world.

The birds have stopped singing.

Felix barely has the time to turn around and slide his dagger out of his belt before he hears the shuffling footsteps, the wood splitting under the weight of an irregular rhythm, the leaves rustling along the wind, or the drag of a long, heavy fabric. Sylvain’s back is solid and warm against his spine, the ridges of his shoulderblades pressing into Felix’s flesh in that way he’s heart-learnt in the last month. Felix’s vision is serrated, mosaiqued by the dark of the tree trunks and the weighty, collapsing branches, tangling in leafy knots around them and through the space like cobwebs, the rustle of leaves growing louder and louder to the beat of an unholy march—

Felix twists on his feet only to see claws, long and hairy and dark as obsidian, curling around the trunk closest to them like a dead spider.

Felix jumps back on a curse, Sylvain swinging his cleaver right through the flesh of the creature’s fingers, and a sickening shriek shakes the forest in a rain of rotten leaves.

Blood sprays over Sylvain’s face as he tears the blade free and runs back to Felix when the creature’s other hand rends through the tree, the beech falling down like a domino to reveal the eight-feet tall frame of monstrosity incarnate, saliva dripping down its canines as it screams and screams and screams, bulbous white eyes opening and honing right on Felix.

“What is up with these fucking skinwalkers,” Felix says as he readies his dagger. The beast takes a running start, the animal pelt half-floating behind it as his feet carve into the ground at each step, the rattle of his breath in his throat coming out as a coughed-out, sinister laugh, and Felix jumps out of the way just late enough to send the creature careening into another tree. Sylvain’s blade carves a perfect half-moon into the beast’s thigh as he swings, and when it falls on a shrill screech, Sylvain jumps onto his back to try and slice its throat—

“Sylvain!!” Felix screams when the skinwalker tears at Sylvain’s arms with his other hand, the claws digging into his forearm until they reach the bone, shaking Sylvain’s frame out of his hirsute spine like a ragdoll until it throws him back against another tree, and when Sylvain swears and Felix tries to run to him the beast stumbles in-between them, a frenzied laugh drooling out of its blood-stained jaw.

Felix is about to dash and stab it right in the chest when the skinwalker changes shape.

Long, dark hair tumbles down thin, pale shoulders like ink pooling on paper; Felix watches as milky eyes turn to ocean blue under the wavy locks that frame marble-cut cheekbones and lips white with death, observes hairy skin dissolving into the torn-up slacks of a black funeral suit, looks at the black, festered wound, eaten up by maggots and the earth, that cuts across a bare chest where the heart should be.

Felix’s gaze crawls up as he looks at Glenn.

“Hey, little brother,” he— _it_ says, his mind reminds him, the voice so familiar to the last time he’d heard it, satin-soft, the tone just this side of teasing, and his hands shake so hard that he almost drops his dagger. _You’re not him_ , he thinks, he says, or perhaps he screams it, _you’re not him, you’re not him_ , and the illusion is so perfect, when Glenn’s remaining hand reaches and buries into the cut on his chest, torn-up nails unbleeding as they open up the gash — when Glenn’s laughter, bright and bold and so, so cold, echoes through the empty forest like an elegy, distorted under the weight of years — when Glenn’s eyes, ultramarine and empty as the sea, flicker unblinking to Felix then to Sylvain, as though deciding which one to torture first — _how dare you_ , Felix shouts, _give him back, let his body rest, give him backgivehimbackgivehimback_ —

There’s the awful sound of blood dripping onto the floor, of torn-up skin and flesh, when Felix runs straight into Glenn, dagger first, and when he looks down, the blade is pristine.

It takes Sylvain’s scream of agony for him to realize his body is where the sound came from.

Felix watches as long, dark claws slowly, carefully pull away from his own stomach, cutting into skin as they make their painful way out through the side. He doesn’t know whether he cries, whether he swears, his eyes refocusing on Glenn’s milk-white eyes — _no, not Glenn, the skinwalker’s_ , he thinks — and when the claws finally slash out of his body Felix falls to the ground, warm blood pooling and blending with the leaves.

The dagger clatters from his fingers as his vision swims, darkens, cold shivers crawling over him like insects. For an instant, he thinks he sees Miklan where his brother once had been, turning to Sylvain with a bloody, clawed hand, before he suddenly sees nothing at all.

***

Awareness claims Felix in waves of whipping pain and the smell of coffee.

His whole body hurts as though thunder-stricken, his eyelids heavy when he blinks back to life, his sandpapered throat dry on dust and ashes. There’s sweat trickling from his hair and down his neck as he lies on a pillow, a proof of weakness his arms are too weak to wipe away, his back solid and rigid against the hard bed. His gaze finds the shape of coffee steam curling up from a mug on the nightstand, blinding together a bouquet of hyacinths, white and purple petals blending together under the haze, and in the armchair—

“Sylvain.”

Sylvain’s eyes are gleaming agates as they turn to him, wide with astonishment, charcoaled in sleeplessness and iodine tears, and soon Felix’s vision is nothing but Sylvain’s face, drowns in the freckles dotting his nose like sugar, fades under the weight of Sylvain’s relief against his lips.

It’s not a pleasant kiss. Sylvain’s hands cup Felix’s cheeks with all the desperation the fear of demise brings, nails scratching into his hair as though he could melt into him, as though he would bury himself into Felix’s wounds and sew them back shut so not even Death could do them part. Felix surrenders to the sublimity of Sylvain’s sentiments, lets his mouth fall open under the words Sylvain whispers against it, _you’re back, you’re here, you’re alive_ , and Felix finds the strength to curl his fingers into Sylvain’s hair, to pull until it hurts enough that Sylvain believes it. The bandages around his waist are cleaving through his skin, his lungs emptying of any molecule that isn’t a proof of Sylvain’s existence, an evidence of Felix’s survival, until Sylvain pulls away and rests his forehead against Felix’s.

“Everything hurts.”

“I know, my heart, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

It’s so Sylvain, to apologize for everything that’s his fault and all the rest that isn’t. It makes Felix laugh, even though each huff is another harrowing laceration. Sylvain must notice, like he always does, because his hand reaches for a glass of water that he helps Felix gulp down. It tastes sweeter than any honey. “What happened? Where are we?”

Sylvain pulls away to sit on the bed, his hand holding Felix’s as though Felix is going to vanish into thin air any minute. “Someone found me. Found us. Into the forest. Brought us back here to help you, to try and keep you alive. None of us could believe you made it. You were out for three days.” The skin of his thumb is rough as it brushes over Felix’s knuckles, his gaze losing itself to harsh remembrances and a flicker of doubt. “I— I’m coming back in two minutes. You need to see something. Don’t fall back asleep, alright?”

Sylvain’s lips brush his forehead as Felix nods, weak and powerless, and the feeling of his hand leaving Felix’s is more painful than any breath he’s taking through his torn-up body. Felix watches him exit the room, the wooden door swinging open down into a hallway and the noise of a kitchen coming to life, peaceful like the song of a winding river. The air is ripe with the scent of fresh, crisp rain, cloud-blinded sunlight glowing through the window near his bed and shining over dew and a colorful flower garden, a pair of gardening shears forgotten along a patch of hollyhocks.

“Pretty, isn’t it?”

Felix stiffens at the unfamiliar voice, his head turning too fast and sending another ripple of pain through his body; a man stands against the doorframe, all long legs and olive skin and a teasing, mysterious smile, like he knows something Felix doesn’t. His eyes are green as after-thunder grass and self-interested kindness, dark hair tumbling in curls along them.

“Who are you?”

“The name’s Claude.”

Felix levels him with a disinterested gaze. “That’s not your real name, is it?”

A one-shouldered shrug; another smile, not unkind. “Does it matter?”

“I suppose it doesn’t,” Felix says, his own lips quirking up in satisfaction. “Are you the one who found us?”

Not-Claude walks into the room with a self-assured step, paces around Felix’s bed to sit in the armchair. “Not quite. That would be Dedue. My partner,” he adds at Felix’s questioning expression. “He has the bad habit of selflessly rescuing lost, half-dead men from the claws of whatever attacked them this week — or whatever they inflicted on themselves.” Claude’s eyes drift to the open hallway, his smile fading into a phantom of its past self. “You were really lucky that he found you. And that the thing that did—” He waves in Felix’s general direction, his eyes still lost to the emptiness of the house. “”— _this_ to you was dead.”

Felix raises an eyebrow in unnoticed scepticism. “Dead?”

Claude’s eyes bore into Felix’s frame, sharp as a dozen knives and ten times deadlier. “Dead. Barely recognizable — from what he told me, there was just flesh and hair and blood all torn to pieces. I don’t think any of the blood on Sylvain’s clothes when you guys wound up here was his. Dedue told me he would have torn his arm off if he even tried to touch you, at first.”

Footsteps sound in crescendo canon to the beat of Felix’s heart, and a mountain of a man appears in the doorway, dark skin set off by the bright silver-white of his hair, greeting him with a nod and the mere crinkle of blue, almond-shaped eyes. There’s a delicate, ornate tray in his huge hands, full of cookies and warm loaves of rosemary bread, the smell drifting over the bitter scent of the medication on the other side; Felix lets himself be manhandled into drinking the pills and accepting the injection offered to him, washes the taste down with the cooled cup of coffee on the nightstand. Sylvain walks back in with a nervous tremor in his shoulders just as Felix finishes the cup. It’s only thanks to Dedue’s impossible stature that Felix doesn’t notice until it’s too late, the cup slipping out of his hands and crashing into cacophony over terracotta tiles.

“You.”

Dimitri is even taller than when he’d last seen him, yet his shoulders are hunched, like he’s going to crumble under the weight of his guilt and Felix’s stare. His hair is longer, too, softened straw blond tied back into a half ponytail — but what’s most striking is the eyepatch on one of his eyes, dark leather contrasting against sky-blue, the threat of a storm. His hands are surprisingly clean.

“Are you feeling better, Felix?”

He doesn’t know if he asks about the slashes in his side or about the gaping hole Glenn’s death left in his heart. Felix’s fingers twitch for the pummel of his dagger, a hunter’s instinct. “Depends what you’re talking about.”

Dimitri’s face twists in sadness and pain, but there’s a shred of dignity and his former, upper-class education in the way he holds his head back up as he turns to the others. “Claude, Dedue… Would you mind leaving us alone for a few minutes?”

“No,” Dedue’s voice booms against the walls, decisive, hostile. “I will not leave you alone with him.” The pronoun is as venomous as Dedue’s glare to Felix as he says it. Felix wonders if he found out too late, about their shared history — after he’d healed Felix enough that he wouldn’t be able to leave him for dead.

“It’s okay, my friend,” Dimitri still says, voice soft and gaze steel-grey as he looks at him. “Besides, I don’t believe Felix to be in a state where he can hurt me, currently.”

“I’m staying, too,” Sylvain adds with a reassuring smile, warm and bittersweet. “You won’t have to worry.”

Dedue remains dreadfully silent as he steps out, Claude following him after whispering something in Dimitri’s ear. Felix knows for certain he, at least, will be listening to their conversation, somehow.

Dimitri stands still, and arm’s reach away from the bed, cautious as though approaching an angry, scared cat. Sylvain sits at the foot of the bed, a strategic position, not too close to Felix to seem smothering, but close enough to shield him, just in case. Dimitri’s sigh is a weary thing, full of sorrow and regret. “I did not think you would find me.”

“I didn’t,” Felix admits, truthful and detached. “I wasn’t looking for you. Don’t flatter yourself.” Sylvain gives him a disapproving gaze and a light slap on the calf through the sheets, and Felix yelps in outrage. That, somehow, makes Dimitri laugh, that wind chime sound Felix has not heard in years, and Felix lets out a long-held breath in preparation. “I… I thought it was you. The killer in the news. I thought… Your ghosts were haunting you again.”

Dimitri’s remaining eye widens, frosted in displeasure and a touch of relief. “I saw that article, yes. I do not know how the people around here jumped to this conclusion, but… Well, it doesn’t matter now. I have not let anything take possession of me since…”

“Since that day.”

“Since that day,” Dimitri agrees. He’s wringing his hands like he wants to crack all of the bones in it.

Felix looks to Sylvain, hopes to find encouragement in him, finds his gaze being strangely evaded. He imagines this is Sylvain’s way of telling him this is something he has to do alone, with his own bitter, badly-chosen words. “That day… Why did you do this? What do you remember?”

“I already told you,” Dimitri says, “all these times when I cried into the night when I thought you didn’t hear me. They told me I was going to be alone. They told me it was the only way I would never be. They told me to let them use me, to fulfill my wish.”

 _And look how that turned out_ , Felix wants to say; _you lost everything that was dear to you and more, and only found company in two weird strangers_. He’s thankful that the pain in his stomach prevents the words from escaping his chest.

“I do not remember… What I did. What _they_ did,” Dimitri corrects, his eye filled to the brim with dry sorrow and the determination outside opinions offer. “It was as though I’d suddenly lost consciousness, and woke up to my house burning to the ground. I only understood because of the way you acted towards me. Of the words you spoke to me.”

“I…” Felix tries, his throat closing up on the words, blazing and torn-out, and he takes a long gulp from his glass of water. “I’m… I’m sorry. For what I did to you. I— I was a child. I should have known better. You didn’t deserve any of it.”

“You were hurting, as well,” Dimitri says, his smile reaching his eyes, his shoulders straightening up under alleviated weight. “You were hurting, and traumatized. Yet, so was I. So I supposed you’re right — I didn’t. Though I now recognize that Rodrigue… didn’t make the best of decisions.”

“But Edelgard’s father wouldn’t have you,” Felix says, sitting up in the bed until his side hurts enough to make him feel something, anything. “Dad wouldn’t have left you behind.” _No matter what his only remaining son had to say about it_ , he reminds himself, painfully at peace. His eyes drop to the broken cup on the ground, on the leftover coffee dripping from the shattered edges onto the tiles like watered-down blood. There’s a realization taking shape in the fog of his mind, hurting like a papercut, sudden and delayed. Felix had spent the last months, the past years, thinking Rodrigue only saw Felix as a replacement for Glenn and Dimitri as a better Felix; the understanding that Rodrigue had tried to raise them as Felix and Dimitri, as _brothers_ , and had failed because of Felix’s own anger, however justified, tears at his lungs harsher than the skinwalker’s claws. “I think… He wanted for us three to find family in each other. However bad he was at it.”

Dimitri, for probably the first time in his life, or at least the one Felix has witnessed, shrugs. “You may be right, but.. What’s past is past. There is no use dwelling over it. I… do not ask for your forgiveness, or even your compassion. Because I don’t think I can grant you mine.”

Felix finds Dimitri’s gaze, earnest and unforgiving, bone-chillingly just, and his lungs fill up with shame and atonement and the tiniest hint of pride. “Good,” he answers instead, and it must sound childish and stubborn, because Felix sees Dimitri’s face twist in surprise, or confusion. It’s hard to differentiate, with that piece of leather hiding a third of his face. “I… cannot promise I’ll be able to forgive you fully, either. But I think I’ve grown enough to say that I now understand a little more. Both you and myself.” Dimitri’s eye is all ice and steel as he stares, but the edges melt along with the slight smile that graces his lips, and the sight is too upsetting for Felix to bear. The hollyhocks outside paint pretty pink over the brick house. “I’m… I’m glad you found peace, if anything.”

“You too,” Dimitri says. Felix finds him staring right at Sylvain when he looks back, seeming half-part relieved, half-part embarrassed, and Felix can feel himself become warm enough to kick the bedsheets off, no matter the pain that flares in his limbs.

“I cannot say that I saw this coming,” Dimitri adds, insult and injury.

“It’s probably the eyepatch,” Sylvain says as he winks, and the sputter that leaves Dimitri’s mouth has Felix laughing, somehow — laughing and laughing and laughing until it borders on hysterical, until it has his cough and has Sylvain bring a warm palm between his shoulderblades and a glass to his lips, until Claude dances back into the room with mockery in his step and amusement in his eyes and Dedue puts himself between Dimitri and the bed.

“What will you two do, now?”

Sylvain hums near Felix’s ear, and it brings shivers down his spine. “Not sure. We’ll probably lay low for a few weeks, let Fe heal up. Then… Who knows?” Felix hears the smile in his voice, feels it in caresses on his back. “What about you, Dimitri?”

Dimitri’s gaze flies between Claude and Dedue, his hands twisting and untwisting as he stands, somehow unsure. “I’m… I’m happy, here. I do not intend to come back, where every part of the city brings me so much pain. At least, not right now. Before you two leave,” Dimitri says, suddenly sheepish, so at odds with the way he’s talked to Felix; he looks to one corner of the room, his expression gentler and clearer and incredibly sadder. “Would you mind… if I spoke to Glenn?”

Sylvain’s own eyes turn to the same corner, to that empty space where Felix’s brother is and that he still cannot see. His chest hurts again, though he doesn’t think it’s from his wound.

“If he wants to,” Sylvain shrugs, and Dimitri lets out a sigh of solace. “We won’t be leaving right away, I think. We won’t go back either, by the way.” Sylvain says, his hand finding Felix’s in a reassuring squeeze. “We can’t anyway. Glenn keeps asking for us to find out what that _fucking skinwalker_ — his words, not mine — did with his body.”

Felix glares at the corner where Glenn’s ghost is probably propped up. “Tell him we’re retiring.”

“He can hear you, you know.”

“Yeah, but I can’t.” It must sound a lot more bitter than what Felix intended, because Dimitri visibly flinches and Sylvain squeezes his hand harder.

“Would you like to?”

Claude produces something from one of his pockets: a device like a walkie-talkie, the antenna strangely shaped, as though bent in unnatural places. “This baby can let you listen to and communicate with spirits. You just have to go near a thin place, find the right frequency, and boom — you can listen to every ghost and wandering soul a kilometer away. Now, I can’t give you this one,” Claude says as he twirls the security rope around an index finger, “but I can tell you where to get one. He’s a friend of mine, builds them right from scratch.”

Felix turns an inquisitive gaze to him. “Who’s your friend?”

***

“Glenn says he cannot wait to see Holst again.”

“I know, Sylvain.”

“Glenn says he cannot wait until we get his body back so that we can find a way to bring him back to life so that he can bang Holst.”

“I know, Sylvain.”

Sylvain turns the key into the ignition, and the camper’s engine burns to life. His hand drifts to Felix’s face, strokes the side of his face with the lightness of a feather, with the weight of a kiss. “I’m sorry. Seems like we won’t have that seaside house and that horse for some time.”

“What a bummer,” Felix says, even as Sylvain catches his satisfied smile in the rearview mirror. Sylvain beats his fingers over the wheel to the crackle of the radio until Felix covers them with his own, wind sweeping his red bangs back as it flutters through the window. His lazy, light-laden laugh shines in strokes of mustard yellow over Felix’s soul.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so so much for reading this monster!! I just loved writing it so much, and I really hope you enjoyed reading it just as much. Please leave a comment if you liked it, and feel free to follow me on twitter @akhikosanada!
> 
> Fic title is from Evil and a Heathen by Franz Ferdinand.


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